


little white dove

by UnintentionallySketchy



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Enemies to Lovers, Eventual Smut, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Hitman!Jamie, Hot Gay Mess, Sexual Tension, Slow Build, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-16 06:15:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29077713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnintentionallySketchy/pseuds/UnintentionallySketchy
Summary: It would have been a lot better if Jamie had just taken out the wife of a witness like she was told. And when she failed, it would have been absolutely ideal not to end up bouncing around Europe with her, trying her hardest not to get caught. It would have been unrealistic to expect neither of them to fall in love.or;the jamie-in-the-mob/dani-on-the-run enemies to lovers to useless gays mind canon.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 268
Kudos: 289





	1. prologue; the assignment

**Author's Note:**

> My other work is almost done so of course that means I must start anew. A prologue, of sorts.

There’s something about the way the spit and blood fly from the corner of his mouth as the butt of the gun strikes his jaw that makes Jamie smile an intrepid little smile. A sniggering grin and then a hard lined frown.

“I told ya, Tommy.” Jamie paces the floor slowly, methodically, allowing her heavy boots to scrape against the cool concrete beneath. “When did I tell ya I needed it by?”

She spins the pistol around her finger - one, twice, three times - before stuffing the heavy 9 millimeter back into the waistband of her loose black jeans.

Once upon a time, it would have bothered her, the way his voice shook and the red stained the top of his lip. It did, it used to. The very first time she was sent out by the Wingraves to collect on an overdue debt, Jamie wasn’t sure she was cut out for this. She wasn’t cut out for the sound of a bone cracking under her force. She wasn’t cut out for the shrill screams of a man far in over his head. She wasn’t cut out for watching the life drain out of somebody’s eyes.

“Tuesday.” The man spit, a tooth falling to the floor.

But Jamie found, in her many years, many debts collected, that each of these men were much the same fabric cut from the same cloth. They were snarmy and vile and altogether grotesque. They were men that beat their wives, that leered at her as she walked past, that got themselves into their own mess all under the guise of selfish illegality. They were gangsters, criminals, and they fought dirty and hard. They would kill her as soon as they would look at her so no, she didn’t feel bad about that.

“Tuesday.” She taps her forefinger to her chin in mock thought. “And what’s today?” Her head cocks to the side as she approaches him, standing above and looking down on this repugnant soul. His eyes were hollow and unforgiving. His teeth were rotted and the sweat pooled in the nape of his neck, foul and grainy. They really were all the same.

He shakes his head and spits again, a bloody blot landing on the toe of her boot. Her open fist connects hard with the top of his nose, feeling the way it cracks and shatters under her palm. “I said what’s today, Tommy?”   
  
“Thursday.” He spat.   


“Thursday! And yet,” Jamie spins the wooden chair that sits beside her, plopping down hard on the frame and leans forward to look at the bruised skin before her. “I don’t have what I’m owed do I?”

The man shakes his head, a bruise starting to form under the dried blood crusting below his eyes. He’s panting, out of breath from the blows across his chin. The rope tied around his hands is turning them blue and Jamie decides that it’s enough for now.

She stands, her small frame even so still intimidating, as she walks around the back of him and cuts the ties that bind. “You’ve got until tomorrow or next time I’ll use the other side of the gun.”

She punctuates it with a swift kick in his back, sending him careening to the ground, and she knows she’s made her point.

* * *

Danielle Clayton didn’t quite know how she ended up here. Here, standing with slumped shoulders, straightening out expensive silverware on an overpriced tablecloth, in an entirely outlandish brownstone in the heart of Notting Hill. 

This wasn’t what she had signed up for, none of it was. She hadn’t signed up to marry a man that decided on a whim to move her across the sea, away from her family and her job and the kids she loved to teach, all because the dollar signs lined up to his benefit. She hadn’t signed up for a life of hedge funds and secrets and late night visits from seedy men. 

Eddie had, for as long as she had known him which was most of her life, been a gentle soul. A bit naive, a bit drab, but most well meaning. They married young, nearly right out of highschool, and though Danielle had her reservations on whether or not there was something more out there for her. She never felt what she had been told her entire life she must; she never felt lucky. But it was safe and comfortable and she never doubted the life he would provide her. Never did, until now.

That was, until he came home one day and said he had accepted a position with a bank in London and they’d be moving in a month.

_ “Danielle,” he had said, “you’ll be able to stay at home and do whatever you want. Anything in the world.”  _

What he didn’t consider, what he never considered when it came to her, was that Danielle wanted to be anything but what she was. She wanted to be somebody, anybody, different. She wanted to be somebody she could be proud of, her own person - Dani, who didn’t get by on just being Eddie’s prized Danielle.

But she never had it in her to do it, to tell him no, to step out of her own darkness and be the person she had trapped down for years. The person, she knew now, that didn’t want him. Didn’t want to be kept at home, raising children, making dinner, playing house. But she never had the courage to step beyond the threshold of routine. She never was quite brave enough to tell him, her family - to resist social normalcy. She was never confident enough to believe that if she just reached out her hand to grab at her dreams, that something, somebody, might just grab it back.

So she nodded to him and put on a fake smile, and bit her lip in silence. She packed up her things and she moved far away from the only home she had ever known. She’d try, it was all she could ever really manage. Just to try.

And now, here she was, standing in a house that didn’t feel like home, with a man who didn’t feel like the person she was meant to be with. 

He laughs, far away and foreboding, in a way that’s entirely unauthentic. She’s playing host again, this time to a colleague of Eddie’s that she isn’t quite sure how they are connected, and she’s putting on her best housewife smile. She’s always playing a role.

“Danielle.” He calls to her and she straightens out the front of her shirt. It’s time.

She turns the corner into the grand kitchen with wall to wall granite and stone and appliances that she barely knew how to work. Her smile is dull and diluted, only tapping her cheeks but never reaching her eyes. Eddie stands stark in a suit that doesn’t match him alongside a man with coiffed hair, a plaid tie, and a wry smile.

“Danielle, make me an Old Fashioned and Peter,” he trails off, waiting for his guest to answer the unasked question.

“Glass of Bordeaux.” Dani can tell, with just a few tight words, that this man is a fraud. His suit is tailored and his shoes are polished but the way he stands, with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets, gives him away. He’s humbled and broke, he’s a gopher, a stooge. He’s dressed the part but he doesn’t fit it. None of them do, three fakers just playing pretend.

Dani hates the way they both look through her, as if she’s merely means to an end. Nothing more than a servant, here to please and to observe, but never to engage.

Eddie was once her friend, the best kind. He was once the boy who would listen to her speak of hopes and fears and he would tell her the world was hers. He was once the boy that would take her hand and prop her up. But Eddie wasn’t a boy anymore, and Dani wasn’t that same girl. 

She presses her lips together in a tight line and spins on her heel, making her way out into the hall to the bar cart and away from their incessant spurious chatter.

“I don’t need to tell you that this must be handled discreetly.” Peter chides in a way that Dani doesn’t settle well in Dani’s gut.

“I know my way around the computers, Mr. Quint. Just tell me what you need done.” Eddie’s voice is soft and Dani hates this version of him. This version of him that doesn’t seem to hold his morals or his tongue in the way that he always used to.

She hates that he’s made in with a crowd of thieves and crooks and conmen. He’s never told her, not in so many words, but Dani knows that the late night dealings he makes are not on the up-and-up. She knows that these men are nothing more than trouble, that Eddie is getting himself mixed up in that trouble, and she’s getting herself - has gotten herself - mixed up in Eddie. It’s unsettling, it’s far  _ beyond  _ unsettling. 

“We need to move 13 million pounds from this account,” Dani hears a shuffle and can only imagine that Peter is writing something down, “over to this one.” 

His tone is light, as if it’s the most simple request, and it settles low in Dani’s belly that this isn’t right.

“And this account belongs to?” Eddie asks, his voice dropping to a whisper and Dani stills her movements and steps in closer to the open door in order to hear them.

“Not a worry to you.” Peter snaps, Dani can imagine the startled look on Eddie’s face. “If you’re going to be asking questions then we can find--”

“No, no not necessary. I’ll have this taken care of in the morning.” There’s a bit more mindless chatter, a bit more inane shuffling, and Dani circles her mind. Because while she didn’t know much about what exactly it was that Eddie did, but she knew that whatever he was promising wasn’t legal, it wasn’t moral, and it absolutely wasn’t something she wanted to know about.

“Danielle. Those drinks?”  He barks and she bites. 

She always bites, it was always her biggest flaw.

* * *

There was nothing about her tiny flat that felt like home to Jamie. 

It was no surprise, really, because in her 27 years on this earth - Jamie never had a home. Only ever a place to eat, fuck, and sleep.

She spent her earliest moments in and out of foster care, in and out of homes with greasy men and horrid children. She spent her teen years on the streets of Brixton, committing petty theft and sordid drug crimes. She spent her early 20s paying for each one of them in a stuffy cell just outside the city. And she spent the last five crossing off the debts she made inside.

When she was 14 she promised herself that as soon as she could make up enough to live, she’d stop. She’d stop stealing, she’d stop running, she’d stop smoking and snorting whatever she could. But those years had come and the world had grown colder, more hideous at every turn, and Jamie couldn’t bring herself to be the one shining light in it.

Do or die trying.

She nearly did - die that is. They had found her, a needle in her arm, lying on a stoop in a puddle of her own vomit. The police discovered a few stolen cell phones, a gram of heroin, and a credit card that absolutely didn’t belong to her. She was booked before she could sober up. 

It should have righted her, it should have straightened her out. It would have, had she had any other option. But she was out of chances, she was out of pathways, and all she had was what she was good at.

Turns out, she learned, she was really good at beating the shit out of people. 

And the rest, as they say. She’d passed the wrong people the wrong notes through the wrong iron rods during her time. She’d fallen in line with the twisted ways of a dangerous crime family just to survive. And then Jamie was out and indebted to the Wingraves and their associates and all their wicked ways.

And it wasn’t the worst thing, she supposed. They paid for her flat, they gave her food and clothes and a gun. All she had to do was keep her mouth shut, never ask questions, and use it on whoever they wanted her to.

She learned it wasn’t her business to ask why.

* * *

“So Peter, was it it that you do?” Dani asks over the roast she had spent nearly three hours making.

She hated roast; the way it smelled, the way it tasted, the way it took up most of her day just to prepare. She mostly hated that her life had been diminished now to perfecting a piece of meat. 

Peter takes a long sip of wine, his eyes narrowing at her over the top on the crystal. “Ay, well,” he sets the glass heavy on the table and Dani feels the way her spine shivers at his glare. “I make money.”

Dani always hated the way men looked through her, as if she was low hanging fruit and ripe to pick. Their eyes burn, judging and clawing at every syllable that falls from her mouth, waiting for her misstep. She’d always been on display, something to take in, something to watch, something to have. Dani loathed their stares, but she never shied away.

“Right, but how?” She’s aware of the way Eddie’s eyes are burning into the side of her head, telling her to mind her place. She’s aware, but she pushes on.

“Danielle.” He reprimands her, the use of her name brash and arrogant.

Peter chokes out a laugh, bitter and brute. “Bit of a nosey one you got yourself there, Eddie.” 

The two share a look, one that says  _ this girl knows no boundaries.  _ One that says  _ women have no place.  _ One that makes Dani wish she had any way out of this life she had unwittingly fallen into.

“Please excuse her, Mr. Quint.” It was something Eddie had picked up as of late, apologizing for Dani. Apologizing in a way that told her she was small, she was wrong.

“I was just making conversation-” It’s soft, the way she refuses to cower.

“Ah, that’s okay.” But the way Peter Quint speaks tells anybody with the ability to read context know that it’s absolutely not okay. His voice sneers, riddled with disdain and contempt. “It’s probably of no interest to you anyhow, Mrs. O’Mara.”

And it shouldn’t be, that’s what he means. He means that if Dani were smart, she’d know to not wonder things outside her bounds. She’d know to speak when spoken to. She’d know her place and her class and her standing.

“It’s Clayton.” She didn’t care.

“Sorry.” The offended way he says the word bathes Dani in condescension.

“My last name is Clayton. I didn’t take Eddie’s.” And if Dani were looking her husband’s way she would see the way he bristles and balks. She would see the way his spine collapses and how his eyes dart over to Peter in a show of humiliation. She would see it and she would smile, but she doesn’t look. She eats her roast, the roast she hates.

It’s silent for a moment, and the air crackles. Dani wonders if maybe she could go. If she could stand and walk out the door and never turn back. If she could remove herself from this world she doesn’t belong in and out into one where she could be free. She’d like it there, she thinks. She’d like the salty way the air would taste, the way unfettered thoughts could flow through her veins. She’d like it. It’d be nice out there.

“Better put a tighter leash on that one. Mark of a good man is an obedient woman, wouldn’t you think?”

But with a loud click of Peter’s tongue Dani is reminded that she’s not out there, she’s in here. She’s in here and she hates it.

“I am my own woman. I don’t belong on a leash.”

And Dani can’t find it in her to not be completely unbothered with the way Eddie remains silent. The lack of words echo, shouting louder than a scream.

“Ay, I s’pose you don’t.”

* * *

Blood was hard to get out of her nail beds. 

Abhorrently difficult, she’d argue. She’d started to dip her cuticles in vaseline to try to keep it from drying under her skin, a trick she’d picked up after her first emotional breakdown at the bright reminder of what her life had been reduced to.

_ Never killed anybody who didn’t deserve it. _

It’s the mantra she’d repeat to herself as she scrubbed at her fingers in the shower. The hot water burned her spine, washing away the aches in her solid muscles. She put her face in the spray, letting the pressure prick at her delicate skin, spitting out what collected under her tongue.

She’d fallen unintentionally into the role. It struck her, the irony, that the one thing she was useful for was being an absolute fucking monster. 

_ But they were all the same. _

She’d never had a choice, didn’t put the gun in her own hand, didn’t force herself to pull the trigger first. She’d made a bad bet, attached herself to the wrong girl and it was a mistake she continued to pay for even years after she was gone.

_ You’re a fine shot, Jamie. _

As if it were a badge of honor. As if she should be proud of the bullets she put in the back of heads. As if it didn’t truly matter, as if she wouldn’t have to answer for these acts one day. 

Crooks and dealers and murderers - never an innocent man. It was a long list of men who raped and pillaged, who had body counts twice as many as her. It was a who’s who of England’s most dodgy underground twats. 

And as Jamie scrubbed the red stain from her porcelain skin, she reminded herself of this. She didn’t have a choice. Or it’d be her blood swirling the drain.

Just enough to survive.

* * *

“You can’t just… talk to these men like that, Danielle.” Eddie’s voice, he finally found it, is loud and ringing. “These men are not--”

He towers her, his slim frame just a shadow of who he once was. No longer the sweet boy next door, no longer the caring kid who held her hand when she crossed the street. Now just a scared man, in over his head, tying her to the wagon he had hitched himself on. Now, she was finding very little worth holding on to.

“Not what? Eddie whatever you have gotten yourself, gotten  _ us _ into,” She rights herself in his rearview as he paces the kitchen, running his hands through messy curls.

“No, no. It’s nothing you need to worry about.” He turns back to her, the safety of the large marble island in between them. He runs his hand along the top, looking down at it’s expanse. “Look, look at everything we have now. Don’t you like this? I’ve done all of this for you, Danielle.”

And Dani wants to scream. Scream that she never wanted this, never asked for this. Scream that she would be just fine in a tattered studio, alone by herself. She wants to yell and fight and she wants to wave her arms and throw a fit. But Dani is tired. She’s tired of being Danielle, she’s tired of being trapped like an ant in glue, she’s so extremely tired. And so, she’s silent. Resigned and exhausted.

Eddie steps into her, wrapping big hands that make her run cold and dry around her shoulders. She bows away from him as he leans down and presses his lips to her tightened cheek.

“There’s a cocktail hour at the firm on Friday. Wear something… nice. Okay?”

She wants to be anywhere but here.

* * *

She barely reaches the phone as she pads across the linoleum floor of the kitchen. She’s not in much of a hurry at all, it seems.

She thought about letting it go all together, letting her answering machine pick it up. She thought about cutting the cord, wandering away, never answering again. She thought about all of it even while she lifts it carefully off the wall and up to her ear.

“Yeah?”

But there was only ever one person on the other end of the line and she couldn’t. She didn’t have a choice, he never let her make one. It was her or it was them and she was more partial to herself than to whatever strangers name was dropped in her ear.

“Friday, yeah.”

She had asked once, what would happen if she said no. She didn’t get an answer, but she got a black eye and a glock shoved into her ribs. 

“Right. Give the name then.”

All the same, she reminded herself. All the men, and even the women.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts? Comments? Concerns? Gtfo with them concerns. Nah I’m just playing. I’m just too sensitive for those.


	2. ties that bind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> and they're off

It’s calming, the sound of indistinct chatter, the ice clinking in glasses, the white noise of boisterous laughs - they all culminate in a gentle rumble that bounces off the high glass ceiling of the atrium. It’s calming because it’s easy to get lost in here. Lost in the shuffle, lost in the fake smiles, haughty hellos, and tender touches of drunk mingling singles.

She’s been to dozens of these types of functions, it seems. Put on the same black slacks, the same thin leather suspenders, tucked in the same crisp white shirt. She nursed dozens of whiskey on the rocks, careful to keep her mind sharp. She’s charmed dozens of women away from their skeevy husbands, made dozens of ill fated transactions in abandoned buildings, and walked away with not an ounce of blood on her hands. 

Not literally, anyway. Metaphorically, well.

She’s learned by now to focus on each task as it comes. She’s learned not to think about the after. About what happens when she walks away, about the people responsible for finding a lifeless body, about the lives ruined or the headlines written. She doesn’t litter her mind on the what if’s - what if she had said no six years ago when they had the butt of the gun to the back of her head and she promised she could make good. What if she had walked away two years before that when a blonde with a kind smile walked into the prison yard and told her she could give her protection.

She doesn’t think about any of it, it’s no use - especially not when the phone will inevitably ring and ask her to do this all over again.

She clinks the thin silver ring around her thumb against the top of the tumbler, letting the way the cold glass sweats in her hand distract her from the way her eyes search not for her mark, but for a way out. All exits blocked, all routes gone down and turned around. The only way now is forward.

Forward further into the room, she moves. Her lazy lingering around pockets of people laughing and rocking on their heels in a boozed stupor. Her polished brown oxfords gliding soundlessly across the marbled tiled of the lobby. She’s made a career of going undetected, under the radar; silent and somber and mysterious. Her eyes stay up, never down, always keeping them moving, reading, consuming her surroundings. They never connect with anybody else, never allow them to see what she’s hiding inside.

He’d made this simple for her this time; tall, curly brown hair, wiry frame, nervous eyes, quintessentially American. 

He didn’t say why and Jamie rarely ever asked, but what she knew was that this man, this Edmund, would have a bag full of cash in his possession and that it was her job to have it in her’s by the end of the night and for him to lay silently behind as she walked away.

It was always fairly simple. Meet the mover, get the bag, two taps, and out of sight.

It was always simple but it was never easy.

She hears a laugh to her right and her eyes pull just over her shoulder. A woman who doesn’t fit with this stuffy crowd stands with one who does. The older woman, probably in her mid-50s, standing with her hand stretched out and waving as the other struggles to balance a martini. She’s animated, likely telling a story of a recent trip to a faraway land, citing butlers and cabana boys. Jamie has seen dozens of women like this too. Boisterous and loud and all together as fake as the plastic in their lips. They gravitate towards money, and money there is here.

But the other is not like what Jamie is used to in rooms like this. Her shoulders sag into themselves as she wraps both arms around her midsection. She’s guarded, Jamie can tell, uncomfortable with the way the woman before her cackles loudly like a hyena and sloshes her drink to the ground. Her lips pull in a tight line that many would mistake for a smile, carefully placed approval, but Jamie knows better. 

Its pain, and its littered all across her beautiful blue eyes as they catch and hold Jamie’s from across the room.

* * *

“I told him that the boat was simply too small. I’ll get seasick, Charles! I told him. I told you, didn’t I?” 

It’s background noise, the way this woman in what is clearly a very fake British accent draws on and on about her summers in the Mediterranean. Dani isn’t listening, she stopped listening about ten minutes ago and now just sits and counts in her head. She counts the amount of times the woman leans forward to touch her shoulders, she counts the minutes that have passed since Eddie went to get them drinks, she counts the amount of times she could have turned around and walked out of this place all together.

“She told me.”

The man and woman, names unimportant and ungathered, nod at each other back and forth. Dani counts the amount of times they bob in synchrony. 

“But he didn’t listen.” Her laugh howls again, phony and screeching.

Dani looks over the couple’s shoulders, between their ears, searching for her husband who has seemingly disappeared. She takes in the many suits and ties, the mid-calf length dresses and the glimmering heels. She takes in the smell of cigars, the droned out babble. She stops on men with tightly cut hairlines, clean shaved faces, and iron creased slacks. She takes in the women on their arms, bottle blonde and pumped full of silicone. In a room full of people, Dani has never felt more alone.

“I didn’t listen.”

Her eyes catch on black and white and pinstriped swag, leaning against a column in the corner. She has a smirk on her face, this green eyed stranger, a knowing glint in her narrowed stare. Dani bristles at the way a chill rips down her spine.

“Has that ever happened to you?”

And it’s just for a moment, because when she turns her head to the woman in front of her who is still rambling on, nodding a confirmation of unknown acceptance before turning back, the woman and her precarious lean are gone.

  
“Sorry?” Dani shakes her head, realizing there’s a question in the face of the woman before her.

“Seasickness, has that happened to you? Oh it’s dreadful when it does. Ruins the whole trip. Spent the entire time just laying on the deck. Couldn’t even enjoy the chef’s meals.”

“Oh, I--I’ve never been on a-” Dani starts, hoping that maybe this can be the end of the conversation, a bridge she cannot cross, a uncommonality far too wide to overcome to continue on with mundane chit-chat.

“Oh Danielle, we must simply get you out. It’s just a quick little hop over France and you’ll be bathing in the sun.” There’s no such luck for her here.

Then, there’s a hand on the small of her back and a husky scent of cologne and cockiness in her nose. “Danielle doesn’t much care for Monaco, more of a girl for the Alps, I s’pose.” The stranger drops a glass red wine into her hand, as if there’s a practiced routine of familiarity between them.

“Oh, I--” Dani begins, turning her head to find the hazel coated stranger right over her shoulder - confident as she leans into Dani’s ear and whispers,

“Just go with it, right?” Her breath is warm and her eyes are focused in on the chatty couple who seem to take her presence in stride. 

“Oh, I don’t care for the cold. Charles tried to get me on one mountainside and I simply refused to leave the chalet. Put me back on the boat!”

There’s a sharp nod of indifference and a slight pressure on her spine as the woman moves to turn Dani away. Away from this, away from wearisome banter, away from humble bragging and condescending smiles.

“Well it’s been lovely chatting, but if you’ll excuse us.” There’s no room in her tone to infer anything but a simplified dismissal. Dani is grateful as the woman directs her to a quiet corner on the right side of the room.

“Thanks.” She breathes through a hushed tone, the steady hand drops from her back and the woman steps back and out of Dani’s space. “These women are just all very--” 

“S’not a problem. Been there before. Looked like you could use some help.” Her lip turns up, her eyebrow to follow in a show of nonchalance, her eyes search the room and her voice is unbothered. 

“Well,” Dani feels nervous now, her own uncertainty shrinks in this stranger's stark bravado. “Still, thank you.” 

There’s a silence now, the delicate features on the face to her side are pulled hard in rough lines. Her jaw is set, teeth ground down into each other as her eyes roam anywhere that isn’t Dani. It’s unsettling, to be near somebody but to feel like they can’t see you.

Dani wonders if she should go, slink off and find her husband. If this was just an act of pity, that she’s been rejected already. Dani can’t understand why that thought has a pit settle in her throat.

“Danielle.” A heavy hand drops on her shoulder and his touch is cold and unwelcome and it sends a shock through her. “I’ve been trying to find you, I need you to go over and introduce yourself to Nancy and James Carpenter. You remember them? I told you about them, didn’t I?”

It’s not that Dani doesn’t notice the way the woman immediately sets her eyes in on Eddie. It’s not that she doesn’t wonder what it is that has her perk up at his presence in a way that isn’t curiosity but absolute admonishment. It’s not that, it’s that Dani doesn’t seem to care much for him being here at all.

“Yeah, right.” She nods, aware that it’s time to put back on the cloak and play the part. She turns once again to the chivalrous stranger, her voice nothing but a mumble under her breath when she says, “thanks again.”

Dani lets the way the heels of her shoes echo into her soul as she walks away. Not focusing on the way her stomach drops at the look they both give her when she turns and heads off to the other side of the room.

“Edmund, right?” She hears as she walks away, picturing her husband’s nod, his hair flopping in her eyes. “I have a message from Peter.”

* * *

The door shuts and the muffled buzz of soft jazz music and boozed up laughter hums to a hush as Jamie steps into the alley behind the hotel, just off the heels of the man leading the way.

She’s aware of everything, the way horns blare from the street only a dozen or so metres away. She’s aware of the nip in the air, the way it smells a bit like frost is just around the corner. She’s aware of the way her gun is strapped to the side of her calf, hidden away from prying eyes. She’s aware of the way Edmund, Eddie’s, hand shakes as he grips tight around the handles of the duffle hanging low by his side.

Jamie steps to his side and puts a hand out to stop him from walking any further. She checks around the corner, into a deeper part of the wrap around where trash is left and beggars often squat. She looks around for any sign of life and when she’s confident that it’s just the two of them, she nods to her right, indicating she wants him to follow.

“Let’s see then.” Jamie waves to the ground between them, he drops the bag heavy at her feet. It slaps against the cold dirt and she can tell just by the sound of it that he’s done what he was told to do.

“It’s all there, I promise.” He says, his voice both shaky and annoyed, as if it wasn’t her place to even question it. The thought of his passive indifference to just how much harm she could do was more insulting than annoying.

She pulls her hair back from her face, her loose curls hanging low over her brow, and throws it into a ponytail as she bends down to one knee, opening it up and looking through. She takes the moment to unholster her gun from her leg as she stands again, her hand tight around the heavy metal, reveling in the small piece of power it gave her. 

“Right. On your knees then.” It's casual, the way she makes it sound like a choice. Like maybe Eddie doesn’t need to do this, maybe he can walk away and maybe there won’t be consequences. But it’s obvious, with the steady ease that she tilts the barrel down to the ground and then back up at him that this isn’t optional. “Hands on your head.”

It was all part of her mark, how she handled these things. She was calculated, but charming. She’d be able to put on a smile, just for the barest of moments, before she pulled the trigger without so much as a frown. She wasn’t their friend. She wasn’t their final place to empty their truths. She wasn’t their priest or their wife, she wasn’t their final chance to make right. By the time they got to her, they were already dead. She was a bagman, a cleaner. She took care of her business and then took care of not getting caught. It was nothing personal; out on an island, just trying to survive.

“Oi, Eddie, you did good. Perfectly, really.” Her voice pitches up, she watches as he takes in her words, carefully swallowing them down. “Problem is, Peter wasn’t very happy about how long it took.”

Peter, God how she hated that man. She often wonders what life would have been like had she never met him. Where she’d be or what she’d be doing. 

She watches as Eddie’s face falls, understanding crossing over into his features. Panic begins to strike him and his hands lift off his head to reach towards her. She lurches forward, the pistol popping to within arms length of him and he stutters. “I know, but my boss was asking me a lot of questions and--”

“Questions? We can’t be having questions.” There’s an audible crack as the butt end of the gun hits his jaw. 

There’s a brief moment where she pities him. She pities the way he tries to sit back up, as if that might be the worst of it. She pities his wife inside, delicate and sweet, and how this will effect her. But she doesn’t let it linger because that’s not her job. Her job;

“Between you and me, I think you did fine. And if it were up to me, you  _ would _ be fine.” She keeps the gun pointed at him, taps him with it once in the chest, just a little push, a little human, a lot terrifying. “But it’s not up to me, is it, Eddie?”

The shakiness in his voice is now a full choke. His words stutter as they come out and she hates this part. She hates when they beg. “Please, I swear I’ll talk to him.”

When they beg is when it’s time for her to go. She can’t deal with that part of it. It’s better to keep them separate, inhuman, just a cog, just the means to and end. All the same, she thinks as she walks around behind him. All the same, as she lifts the barrel to the back of his head and cocks it back, loading the first bullet into the chamber.

“Bit late for that m’afraid.” She breathes heavily and repeats what she always does right before she pulls the trigger. “Sorry ‘bout this, mate. Just following orders.”

There’s a bang. But it’s not from her.

* * *

Dani doesn’t know what she expects to see when she throws open the door to the dark alley that her husband had disappeared out of only a few minutes before with a tote in his hand and the stranger who had rescued before. The metal cracks as it hits the brick, her brain toying with the idea that she might find him in a heated argument with the shady character that had been at her home just a few days before. Or maybe an illicit affair, wrapped up in a passionate embrace. She’d raced through possibilities in her mind, but none had come close to this.

None had come close to him, on the ground, blood dripping down over his nose and mouth, and the woman pointing a silver barreled gun at the back of his skull. 

“Stop!” Her lungs choked over the word as the kind eyes who had found her across the room now turned to her with venom and ice. 

It never occurs to Dani to turn back around, go back inside, to call for help. Her feet rooted in place, her back rigid in fear as the woman sets her feet towards her, gun now pointed directly at Dani’s own chest.

She watches as things happen in slow motion. She watches this dark haired woman lift the gun, s slight shake in her hand. She watches as Eddie turns his head over his shoulder, a thin line where his mouth should be yelling for Dani to run. She watches as he gets up and darts to the fence, sliding his small frame through the gap and disappearing into the night. It never occurs to Dani to yell after his retreating form as he left her alone in that dark corner.

She hears the two pops from the gun and she closes her eyes at their volume. She’s sure that she’ll never open them again. She waits patiently for the pain to set in, for her memories to arrive, to swirl in front of her eyes and remind her of the short life she had and how almost none of it seemed worth remembering. 

She waits and she waits and none of it comes. Only silence. Only darkness. Only the cold air that sweeps up her hair, before that same husky cologne from earlier drifts into her senses and there’s a tattered and vicious whisper in her ear as she’s pushed roughly against the brick building.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

When Dani opens her eyes she finds that those hazel eyes are now black. And they are close, leaning into her space, shining in the darkness. The woman leans in, her forearm crossed over Dani’s throat and holding in her place. Her eyes lock in on Dani’s, searching - for what Dani doesn’t know. Dani sucks in a breath, holding tight at the way her lungs burn at the ache to scream.

She doesn’t though. She stays silent. She lets the arm around her neck tighten in place as the woman leans forward and presses her head to the wall, her entire body trapping Dani in place.

“Fuck.” It’s a whisper meant for nobody, through heavy breaths that puff out against Dani’s bare shoulder. It’s both lewd and shaky and Dani knows that it’s laced in fear and frustration. 

Dani doesn’t know what she expects but feeling cold metal dig into her ribs as the woman leans back and looks her in the eye isn’t it. Not when it’s followed by that arm that anchors itself on her chest, grabs at her shoulder and spins her around, pinning both wrists together behind her back and the gun still in her side. She doesn’t know what she expects but the cold words that are husked in her ears aren’t them. 

“Come with me and don’t make a fucking sound.”

* * *

It’s all sort of a blur from there. She focuses on the way the woman behind her drapes her jacket across her shoulders and wraps a firm arm around her back. It would look intimate, if not for the fact that it’s only to hide the pistol that’s pressed in on her. 

She doesn’t remember the wolf whistle that hails down the taxi in the street. Doesn’t remember the address that’s barked out to an uninterested driver who does nothing but grunt in acknowledgment. Doesn’t remember being slid across a squeaky black leather seat, blocked in tight by a lean body beside her. 

What she knows now is that this woman, this stranger who has somehow turned from a kind hero to a dark villain in just moments, is leaning into her, digging sharp nails into her knee and trying to get her attention.

Dani wonders what would happen if she were to scream, to yell to the driver that she’s being kidnapped and to stop the car. She wonders if Eddie has called the police by now. She wonders if the bullet would hurt as it pierces her skin.

She spends so much time wondering that she doesn’t realize that she’s now out of the taxi, up a flight of stairs, and standing in front of a beat up door of a rusted apartment building.

* * *

Jamie’s mind hasn’t settled since the second shot came out of her gun, hitting an empty trash bin and ricocheting to the ground. It hasn’t settled since she watched Eddie O’Mara get up and run away with her freedom.

There was no failing at an assignment. There was no calling Peter Quint and telling him  _ sorry boss, but he got away. I’ll get him next time. _ It was them or it was her and she never let the option be her. 

She’d never stuttered before, never hesitated with her finger on the trigger. Never once missed with herself cocked and loaded and she doesn’t know what made her freeze that fraction of a moment the second she heard the door open.

She should have fired then, should have taken them both out and walked away clean. She shouldn’t have turned her back on him, leaving a path for his escape. She shouldn’t have blinked, even for a second, to think about lowering her gun at the woman with pain in her eyes. This is what she got for feeling. She got trouble, only ever trouble.

And now, here she is, with that woman perched on the edge of her bed, hands bound together with the shoelace from her rotted sneakers as she stuffs as much of the cash from Eddie’s duffle and whatever clean clothes she can find in her haphazard stack of unfolded clothes into a large backpack. She can’t have more than thirty minutes to get out of here before somebody comes looking.

“Put these on.” Jamie throws a old tattered pair of baggy sweats at her, letting them fall into her lap.

“Are you serious?” Danielle asks, incredulous and annoyed. Jamie smirks at her, she definitely has some bite to her.

The woman is scared, Jamie can tell. And she would feel bad, if she let herself. She would feel bad that she’s robbing this woman of any sense of naivety to this underground world Danielle has gotten herself mixed up in, the world her own husband got mixed up in for her, but she doesn’t have time. Neither of them have time.

“Do I look like I’m not fuckin’ serious?” Jamie’s words fall out casually distracted as she reaches under her bed for the lock-key safe she keeps hidden.

“Kind of hard to do when you have me all-” Danielle raises her hands and shakes them in place, as if Jamie is unaware just how precarious the situation is. 

Jamie turns to her with a sigh, impatient and anxious as she pulls the switch blade from the waist band of her pants. She watches the way Danielle flinches - from the blade or from the look in her eyes, she’s not sure. She grabs at the bound wrists and flicks the sharp edge through the tie in one swift motion before dropping both hands back into the girls trembling lap.

“Said put them on.” 

She senses the movement behind her as she turns her back in a show of privacy and opens the armoured box. There are two more firearms, which she’s careful to unload and drop into the bag. She reaches in for the stack of passports, flipping through and finding one that will match best with a blue eyed, blonde haired American and turning to hold it up to Danielle’s likeness.

“That will do for now.” She mutters to herself as she closes one eye and measures them against each other.

Danielle’s dress is on the floor and her frame is small in Jamie’s baggy clothes. Her mouth opens and closes several times like a guppy before settling on,

“I won’t tell anybody. I promise. You can just leave me here and-- I don’t even know your name. I couldn’t even turn you in if I wanted and--”

It’s something in the way her voice cracks on every other syllable that let’s Jamie know that Danielle has no idea what she’s wrapped herself up in. She has no idea the damage she caused by throwing open that door and walking out and just  _ looking _ . Just looking at Jamie with soft eyes and making her finger hesitate on the trigger. She has no idea what any of this means and something in that infuriates Jamie in that moment as she advances on Danielle, pinning her against the wall with a mouth over her hand and a hard set in her jaw.

“Shut the fuck up, mate.” Jamie huffs, her breath coming out in short spurts, realizing that she’s been pressed up against this woman more times in an hour than she’s allowed herself in the last blink of a lifetime. She breathes and Danielle breathes and settles against her. “Right? Do you wanna fuckin’ live?”

Danielle’s lips are soft against her palm as she nods and Jamie drops her hand as if it’s been burned over an open flame.

“Where is your phone?” Danielle nods to her purse on the floor by the couch. Jamie has the phone in her hand within seconds, throwing it into the sink with her own and turning the water on.

“Right, let’s go.” She reaches out for Danielle’s arm, bag slung over her shoulder, ready to yank her forward and through and somewhere that’s anywhere but here but there’s resistance. There’s a tug. There’s a fire in her face as her voice raises and yells,

“Go? No. I’m not going anywhere with you. I don’t even know who you are, you tied me up, and you tried to kill my husband!”

Jamie’s hand twitches toward the gun in the waistband of her pants. She considers for a moment doing this the hardest way she can. She considers using force, using whatever necessary, because she only has minutes before somebody finds them and she has no choice at all. Instead, she moves her trembling hand to her curly hair and pulls at the roots. 

“I swear to God I’ll leave you here to die if you don’t get up. So yes, we need to fuckin’ go, Danielle.” Her eyes are serious, trying everything to convey to this dense American that this is her only option. And something about the way her chin juts out and she stomps her foot must pick just enough at Danielle’s resolve because she takes a small nervous step towards the door.

“Dani.” She says as she passes Jamie in the narrow doorway. “I hate Danielle.”

There’s a small tug at Jamie’s lip, just a wire hair upwards, now that Dani seems to give in. Jamie always did like winning. “Right, then. Let’s go, Dani.” The door slams hard behind her and she checks the handle before turning and finding Dani looking at her with a question on the edge of her lips.

“Can you at least tell me your name? And where we are going?”

Jamie goes back and forth, chewing the words around in her mouth, trying to decide how willing she is to tell her absolutely anything. But there's something there buried under raw and enmity and fear, and she decides that maybe honesty is a good place to start if they are going to try and survive all this. “Jamie. And Paris.” No matter what the cost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Would love to hear your thoughts.


	3. i never

Ever since she was a young girl in Iowa, Dani dreamed in color. She dreamed of the different hues of pink in the spring - the petals on the flowers that bloomed every April, the way they popped against the dull greys that had painted the ground for months on end. She loved the flavors of green that decorated the trees through the year. There was a comfort in the sameness she could always count on, through the bitter cold snowfalls and the blistering heat waves in the summer. She loved the yellows of the popsicles that would melt in her hand, the way the sticky sweet sugar would coat her hands and remind her of youthful ignorance. The browns and oranges of the changing leaves in the fall - football on the television and the shouting children in the street.

She dreamed in a melting kaleidoscope of blush and paint. Dreamed of cheeks painted red with lust as lips kissed the hollow of her throat. Of white knuckles grabbing the bed sheets in the throws of passion. Of the crisp linen sheets she could feel against her back after making love for hours with a faceless mystery, polka dots of all the colors moulding into one dotting behind her eyelids. She never dreamed of Eddie. Eddie wasn’t color, Eddie had always been the grey in her black and white reality.

Dani closes her eyes now and tries to picture him. Tries to picture her bed at home, his hair against the pillow, mouth open and snoring through the drab air of their brownstone. She can’t though, picture him like that. It was not what she had committed to her memory. She’d never stopped and looked and took in the freckles that littered his cheeks, or the direction of the curls in his hair. She never printed it, saved it for later, to revisit when she needed something to smile about.

In hindsight, that all should have been a sign.

There’s a rumble in the background that wakes Dani back to her reality, back to the cold dingy hotel room she sits in now. The stale air pumps loudly from the corner of the room turning over and blowing directly into her face. 

She’s listened to it kick on and off and on again at least two dozen times over the last 24 hours. She’s watched the sun go up and down through the heavy curtains that are drawn closed - casting the light out and them in. There’s a tv on in the background, it’s volume low and it’s artificial color cascading onto grey walls. She’d asked Jamie to turn it up, just to hear something aside from silence, despite not being able to understand any of the words that are said.

Jamie is silent, has been since they arrived. Dani’s efforts to make her talk, to give her some indication that there is comradery in their hideaway, have fallen short and dim in the shared space between them.

They had arrived late the night before, sometime in the early hours of the morning, and Dani hadn’t had time to think about the way everything in her body ached and everything in her mind fogged. Jamie had found the most decrepit hostel in the city, Dani was sure. The kind where nobody asked questions.

The room was no bigger than her dorm room in college, two small mattresses lay side by side on rickety springs, a lightweight blanket and a thin pillow designated for each. There was a toilet and a sink and a small television on a table. The walls were faded tan, the ceilings were stained. Dani didn’t know what prison felt like but she imagined it couldn’t be much worse than where she was now.

The light overhead was blinding, so they didn’t turn it on. Instead, a dimmed lamp stayed alight in between them while Jamie sat ramrod straight at the foot end of the bed with a journal open in her lap; constantly ping ponging between frenzied writing and far off staring in thought.

Dani tried not to watch her, tried to keep her eyes on the Parisian news channel or the stain above her head that slightly resembled Texas. Dani counted the dings in the wall that had been recovered by plaster. She focused on color, the colors in her dreams, and warded off the numbness of this muted, bland room. 

She didn’t watch the way Jamie’s sharp jaw clenched, of the way her short nails drummed on the page. She didn’t watch as her eyebrows furrowed, a hard line setting in the crease of her forehead. She didn’t watch the way Jamie chewed on the tail end of the pen before taking it out of her mouth and tapping it to her teeth. She didn’t watch how it was a pattern, how three taps meant Jamie was about to start writing again.

She didn’t notice the way her eyes were hazel and reminded her of the trees in her dreams. She didn’t notice the brown of the moles that dotted her skin, from her wrists to her elbows to her strong shoulders that peaked out beneath the stark white wife beater that laid loosely across her chest. She didn’t notice the black under her nails or the grey circles under her eyes from what Dani would assume [if she were assuming] was days without sleep. 

No, Dani wouldn’t let herself notice any of those colors. Those weren’t the colors she was dreaming about.

The noise from a notebook slamming closed has Dani shifting her eyes towards the woman beside her.

“Going out for a bit.” It’s the first she’s spoken since her grumbled _‘take whichever one you want’_ when they first stepped in the room. Her voice is cracked and harsh, her rasp low and Dani runs cold.

Jamie doesn’t offer any more and the way she moves about the small room, slipping her wallet into her back pocket, doesn’t allow for any questions. She’s still in the same clothes from the night they met - her black slacks have grown even looser from days of wear, the suspenders dangle at her sides, her white collared shirt has been disregarded leaving only the undershirt on display. She looks exhausted, and she looks like if you were to suggest that she would only bark in return.

And Dani thinks that this might be her chance, she could sneak out to the road, stumble upon a kind stranger, get to a payphone, call the embassy and this would all be over. She’d wake up from this miserable dream. But when Jamie stands up from rummaging in her bag, a flash of silver clinking in her hand, Dani thinks maybe not. Dani thinks,

“Oh you have got to be kidding me.” She deadpans, looking at Jamie’s hands fiddling with the first linked shackle, popping it open and turning on her heel. 

Jamie, to her credit, doesn’t flinch. Her voice sighs low, as if she knew exactly what Dani’s reaction would be before she even turned around. “M’not kidding you.”

What should only be four steps from where she stands seems to take her nearly a quarter of forever as she approaches Dani. Dani who is perched against the headboard, her eyes focused on the cuffs in Jamie’s hands. Seems to take forever as she takes slow deliberate steps, her face unreadable and haunting. Dani let’s the cold air sweep over her, noticing how the chill in the room seems to have increased. 

There’s something expected in her eyes as she stands over Dani, stature small but dwarfing Dani in her stare. She waits, patiently and methodically for Dani to break, to move, to snatch or grab or run. Her stillness is stifling and Dani thinks that maybe there’s a way to break into the locked jail that is Jamie’s mind.

She arches her eyebrow in challenge, puffing her chest out and straightening her back as she leans forward off the wall. “What, don’t trust me?”

Jamie laughs, but there’s no humor in her bark. It’s just a puff of air shot out from her flared nostrils as she rolls her eyes up in time to a nod of her head.

She settles back on a stare and a snarl as she holds out her hand and motions Dani forward. “Don’t think you trust me actually.”

Defiantly, Dani crosses her arms over herself. “You’re some sort of crazed coyote that kidnapped me so no, I don’t trust you.” Jamie’s lip pulls upward and her eyes raise. She’s getting impatient now, Dani can tell. 

She closes her eyes for the briefest of moments before letting out a breath through her teeth. “My point. Make it easier on the both of us, yeah?” When Dani doesn’t move, Jamie takes another short step forward, leaning down and into her space with a whisper on her lips as if the next part is a secret. “Come on, Dani. I’ll make them loose.”

Dani won’t budge. She refuses to negotiate on this, being treated like a captive. She’d already gotten here, with very few [see; none] questions asked and answered. Her lips press together and she looks up into Jamie’s eyes, searching for a hint that this woman isn’t just plain evil or crazy. Jamie blinks, turning her head and gaze off to the side. Dani watches her clenched jaw soften just a small amount.

“Come on, I’ve heard your stomach growl about ten times, I’m going to get you some bloody fuckin’ food.”

And as if on cue, her stomach hollows out and gurgles. Her mouth suddenly dry, her hands suddenly shaky. As if the mere mention of any type of sustenance reminds her that she hasn’t had any, not a drop, in over a day.

She holds out her arm and Jamie is quick to wrap her fingers around her narrow wrist, clicking metal into place and then securing it against the slat of the bed frame. The sound grinds and Dani notices the way Jamie’s face seems to settle in relief.

“Bring me something good at least.” She huffs out a breath with a roll of her eyes as she turns her focus on Jamie’s retreating saunter.

“As you wish.” She hears, just out of reach, before the door clicks closed.

* * *

Jamie comes back almost an hour later with two large brown bags full of bread and cheese and whiskey. 

Dani had started to worry when the minutes clicked by and the room had remained cloaked in silence that maybe she wasn’t coming back at all. Maybe this had been part of the plan, that she’d leave her here and run to somewhere nobody could ever find her. Dani’s heart raced at the thought that she may just die here, alone in this colorless room.

And it shouldn’t have been a relief when the door flew open, slamming itself into the wall with a crack, but Dani was able to breathe just a little steadier that at least she wasn’t alone anymore. Jamie may not have been the ideal mate for her to spend her hours with, but at least she was something and Dani was used to feeling isolated even in an occupied room. 

She offers Dani very little on where she had been as she drops the bags down onto her bed, unloading its contents of the most simple necessities like a bar of soap, a couple toothbrushes and a pack of cigarettes. She throws a sandwich and a bottle of water onto Dani’s lap and only grunts when Dani rattles the chain around her wrist as a reminder that she still need the restraints undone.

The metal falls dully from her aching wrist as Jamie turns sharply on her heel and perches herself on the end of the bed, back to Dani and head pointed at the ceiling. Dani studies her carefully as she slowly rakes her blunt nails down the column of her throat, up and down and up again, leaving faint red marks in their wake. And if Dani can ignore the way her skin tightens at the motion, she’d be all the better for it.

Dani unwraps the tinfoil and takes a hearty bite of bread and ham and Jamie leans backwards onto her palms, the middle of bed sinking down with her. It should be troubling, the silence. Should be uncomfortable, should make Dani want to speak through it, ask questions, demand answers. But she finds that there is comfort in Jamie’s stillness. Like a calm before the storm, she knows there’s something brewing far off into the distance, can hear it rumbling, knows there will be lightning and thunder and a downpour she won’t weather, but for now - the silence is peaceful. It will be peaceful to hold onto for later.

She watches nimble fingers twist around a pack of cigarettes, running it mindlessly through in a figure eight pattern. The awkward shape of the box never stutters in her grasp, her long fingers weaving it back and forth between thumb and ring finger, flipping it onto its side and back again. Like she’s thinking about whether or not she wants to take the step to open them, battling on just when the right moment is. 

“Can I have one of those?” Dani hears herself ask before she even stops to think. She’s never had a cigarette in her life, but something about the way the box rolls around finds her craving what’s inside.

Jamie doesn’t respond, just flips the pack into her palm and beats it down gently on her leg. She grabs the corner of the plastic with her teeth, ripping at the edges. It’s all such practiced method, the way she opens it, Dani knows, like second nature. 

The way she taps one out of the pack, plucking the end between the pads of her thumb and middle finger. The way it hides in the palm of her hand as she brings it to her lips, bowing her head down to meet it. The way it hangs so gently from her plump bottom lip before sucking it into a steady place, and bringing her cupped hands up to the end. Her thumb pressing gently against the space between the top of her lip and her nostril as she flicks the lighter and breathes in.

Dani sucks in a breath between her teeth as Jamie takes it out of her mouth, and hands it to Dani without so much as a look over her shoulder. Nothing but a huff as she stands and says, “Going to shower.” 

Dani tries not to focus on the way Jamie’s fingers pop at the button of her pants as she walks away. Dani tries not to focus on the solid stomach that peeks out beneath the dirty white shirt that she lifts over her head as she turns the corner, just tan hips jutting from the undone waistband.

Dani can only focus on the fact that the ash from the lit but unsmoked cigarette is now falling into her lap as she finally lifts it to her lips to taste.

* * *

Dani turned off the spray of the water as it ran cold. It hadn’t ever been hot, only manageably warm, but it had been enough to soothe the ache in her joints as she let the water trail down her spine. It hadn’t been enough to let the air catch fully in her lungs, not enough to forget where she was, not enough to shake out the image of Jamie in only a thin towel, squeezing the water from the ends down over her sharp collar bone and into the peak of her--

Dani had decided that there was only one way to relax, and that was the good old fashioned way.

There are no cups in the room, no ice, and the warm whiskey burns her throat as it goes down as she takes another swig from the bottle. 

Jamie was sitting cross legged on her side, taking her pistol apart and wiping away all the invisible traces of gunpowder and blood. It was slow and methodical, the way she inspected each piece before setting it to her side and picking up the next in line.

She dips the corner of a towel into a small jar of liquid, bringing the barrel up to her nose and closing one eye. She’s a pro, Dani can tell. This is something she does; shoot, clean, assemble, repeat. Everything about her was professional, even the way she fled. There was a plan, the way passports were stacked and clothes were ready. Nothing Jamie did was by accident, nothing was impulse, everything was structured and planned and it wracked Dani’s mind with questions.

“Why did you shoot?” Is the first one she decides on. And when Jamie is silent, continuing her precise ritual, Dani leans in and speaks louder. “At Eddie? Why were you trying to shoot him?

Jamie sighs as she looks down at all the pieces of her gun laying flat on the bed. She picks them up and begins to reassemble.

“Does it have anything to do with Peter? With whatever Eddie was doing for Peter?” Dani follows up, as if the still air isn’t still at all. 

Jamie huffs and shakes her head, ever so slightly, as she pushes the barrel back into place with a click. “Don’t need to be speakin’ about Peter fuckin’ Quint.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Dani takes another hard swig of whiskey and tries not to let herself grimace at the taste. “He was at our house--Peter, I mean. Like just a few days ago he was there and I overheard him asking Eddie to do him a favor and when I tried to bring it up later--”

“Dani,” her voice is firm, no place in it for argument, and Dani’s mouth snaps closed as Jamie’s head turns over her shoulder. She pushes the loaded magazine up unto the grip. “You keep Peter’s name out of your mouth, alright? No good comes of saying it.”

Dani nods. Another drink, another scowl. 

Jamie stands between the two beds, the space between them so minimal that Dani can smell the soap on her skin as she looks down. Her eyes are stern, brighter than they had been before, but Dani can’t mistake the tinge of worry that sits behind their icy glare. She reaches down and grabs the bottle from Dani’s hand, bringing it to her lips and tilting her head back and Dani notices that the red lines from her nails have faded along her throat.

“Why didn’t you kill me in that alley?” Is the second question that enters Dani’s mind.

There’s no grimace as Jamie swallows. 

“I don’t kill women.” Dani suspects Jamie doesn’t lie either as she takes another drink.

* * *

Dani is well on her way to drunk as she settles herself against the headboard, eyes closed and waiting for the spin to stop. They’ve been trading the bottle back and forth for an hour and Dani revels in the way the liquor warms her bones and calms her nerves.

Jamie isn’t as scary now, not with good buzz, clean hair, and food in her stomach. She isn’t welcoming or warm, but her sharp jaw isn’t clenched and grinding down on itself.

Dani rolls over onto her side, her vision blurring and then setting on that jaw. Studying it’s lines, razor fine angles that could cut flesh. She wonders if she touched it if she would bleed.

“You’ve never played this?” Her words come out, lazy, painting all the corners of her mouth. She chews on them, rolls them around slowly as they fall off her tongue.

Jamie shakes her head, Dani’s eyes pinned on that line, holding her focus steady.

Dani shifts, leaning up on crooked elbow, her chin dropping into the palm of her hand. “Okay I’ll teach you.” Jamie stays still, lying on her back with her eyes trained on the ceiling. Her hand flicking at the lighter in her fingers, the other drumming at the barely there thin line of visible skin between her shirt and sweatpants.

“Hold up five fingers.” Another flick, another close. Jamie’s hands stay occupied. “Come on, it’s a good way to get to know each other. Just hold up five fingers.”

Jamie drops the lighter into the groove of her hips, catching in the dip, and she rests an open palm, fingers spread wide, on top her thigh.

Dani supposes that’s good enough. “Okay so now I would say something like _never have I ever shot a gun_. And you clearly have, so you would drink. And then you go and say something you’ve never done and if I have, I drink. First one to put down all five fingers loses.”

Jamie seems to mull that over for a moment, Dani’s eyes moving off her jaw as the corner of her lip turns up, crooked and crude.

“Can’t we just drink in silence?” And then, quietly, and to herself, “I like it better when they are bound and gagged.”

It’s not meant for her ears and it’s likely just leftover residue from the several shots of whiskey, but Jamie’s words settle low in Dani’s stomach, flipping over and grabbing at her nerves. She sits up further, ignoring the way that there’s an image in her mind that she’s beginning to paint - one that had never even whispered itself to her - and it’s just the alcohol, she tells herself. Only the alcohol.

“Alright, I’ll go first.” She clears her throat, shaking it away. “Never have I ever... ridden on a motorcycle.”

Jamie turns her head, her eyes glassy and lidded. Her mouth flat and her hand reaching back for the lighter again. “This is stupid. That’s the best you’ve got?”

Dani agrees, it’s stupid. It’s always been stupid, but she aches to know even something about this woman she’s cooped up with in this decrepit motel. This woman who up until just a handful of nights ago was nothing in her world. Now, she’s her only lifeline. Now that she’s,

“Never have I ever held somebody hostage.” Dani says it seriously, there’s a sting in her words as she punctuates the end with a gusty punch of sarcasm. Her voice laced with mockery, a ledge she goes out on. Jamie bites; a smile, a genuine laugh, finally, and she’s reaching for the bottle and taking a drink.

Dani smiles to herself. Her fuzzy mind playing back through; back through Jamie clicking the clip of the gun back into place, through the way she had held it to Dani’s ribs in a dark and narrow alley, through the way she had guided her hips through her door and forced her down onto the couch and hissed at her to stay quiet.

Through all this, it occurs to Dani, “Am I your first?”

Jamie’s eyes narrow at the question, thinking it over, letting Dani’s question digest. Dani watches a few expressions play over her features as Jamie sits up, pressing her back into the headboard and bringing a cigarette to her lips.

It takes a moment for it all to settle. Takes a moment for the smoke to clear, for Jamie to decide on playful honesty as her voice lowers. She takes another drag and licks her lips, the smoke falling easily from her lips as she speaks.

Her eyebrow lifts as she catches Dani’s eyes. “The first woman I’ve pinned against a wall? The first woman I’ve had handcuffed to a bed?” Dani finds herself hooked on the fishing line of her carefully created words. “No, Dani, m’fraid you're not my first.” 

She brings the butt to her lips, tapping on the bottom one before pulling her hand away and adding, “first that maybe didn’t beg for it though.”

And, oh. Those colors return to Dani’s vision. Sparkling, popping, bursting. The confetti of it all falling into her throat and suddenly it’s dry. Dani drinks.

It seems to be the reaction Jamie was looking for when she stomps out her cigarette into the ashtray between them and then stands to cross the room, leaving Dani staring into the dense fog of her mind, the words lying torrid between them.

It’s not that Dani had never considered being with other women, imagined it even sometimes when she was lying beneath Eddie. It wasn’t that she had never thought of smooth skin and delicate curves and long hair between her fingers. It wasn’t that she never considered things could go beyond - beyond the traditional, the expected, the simple. It was only that she never considered it a viable option. She had never considered meeting a woman and feeling like they could be the one to lead her across a forbidden bridge to unearthed fantasy.

But Jamie had experience. It was obvious in her walk, in the way her lips formed words, and the way her knuckles danced over her own skin. She had experience; world experience, life experience. It was in everything she did. She knew people, could read them, could read their expressions and their minds and their bodies - that much was obvious. Dani considered, considered all that had been left unconsidered for so long.

“How long have you been with Eddie, then?” Jamie hands the open pack to Dani, her voice casual now like they were just old friends. Like she had no idea what the timbre of her voice could uncover.

Dani tries to picture her husband. Tries, fails. “Since before I started counting. I don’t know, fifteen maybe? We just sort of fell into it when we were young and before I knew it I was married to him. I’ve never really even considered how long it’s been.”

“So he’s the only guy you’ve ever been with then?”

“Been with like--”

“Dated, shagged, held hands or whatever it is people in love do.” Love. She says it so casually. The assumption of love being thrown around like a rag-doll.

Dani wonders if she’s ever been in love with Eddie, truly in love. She’s loved Eddie, she’s had love for him. She’s respected him and enjoyed him. They’ve laughed together and cried together and he’s been her best friend. But she’s never craved him.

“I-- yeah, I mean I guess he is. He’s been the only option I guess.” 

Jamie hums, as if the answer is enough. Jamie hums like she doesn’t know what never having another option has done to Dani, how it’s kept her from reaching out for anything that could look like love.

“Well for what it’s worth, I bet it’s nice, having one person. Bet that would be nice.”

They both are drunk, that’s what makes Dani shiver as Jamie catches her eyes over the half empty bottle. That’s what makes Dani bring the pad of her thumb up to her mouth, pressing her teeth hard against it, trying to leave a mark, just to have something to bite into. They are drunk, that’s what makes her say it.

“Never have I ever had, well, I’ve never had an orgasm. With--with Eddie.”

Jamie’s lips curl, a devious smile on her face, as if this somehow pleases her. As if these are points against him, the man she had nearly killed.

“Eddie not a pistol in the sack, then? Not bringing you to your knees?” 

Dani looks down at the dents in her thumb, not even realizing how hard she had been biting. She shakes her head, as if ashamed. And she’s about to take it back, about to blame it on the alcohol, about to say goodnight and go to sleep, until she lifts her head and sees Jamie biting her lip with a cocked eyebrow.

“Well I recommend you don’t wait around on him too long for that, Dani. Life is too short. I know ‘nuff about that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Would love to hear what your thoughts on them!


	4. the bartender

The ball squishes in her hand, the gel inside forming against her knuckles as she squeezes it tight. She studies the way it molds, contorting against her grip, before popping back into a perfect circle as she releases the tension.

The air in the room is stale and Dani is sick of it. Sick of the same drab walls, the same stifling churn of the air conditioner, the same spoiled odor that lingered from days of chain smoking and drinking straight from the bottle. 

It smelled now of ammonia. The sharp odor brought Dani back to yesterdays spent with her mother at the salon, listening to her babble on about the town gossip with her hair folded in tinfoil. She’d lecture her on the importance of upkeep, how it was the job of a woman to be primped and primed for her husband.  _ “You can’t give yourself away to the years because of comfort, Danielle.”  _

It was something her mother was always concerned with, Dani keeping the attention of Eddie. As if she wasn’t enough as she was, as if she needed to be somebody else to make him happy. And maybe she did, she never truly felt like she was living her most honest self in all her years with him. She always was keeping something locked away, stored and hidden, to never be visited even in the darkest of nights.

So she’d sit and listen as her mother told her all about how Pastor John was likely having an affair with Kathy who ran their books. She’d try not to squirm as Rhonda pulled at the ends of her hair and painted her roots the honey blonde she had maintained since she was a teenager and her mother decided she liked her better that way. She’d try to laugh along with their mockery, their crude gossip, and she’d try to pretend like this was where she belonged.

It was all part of the person she molded herself into to keep them all happy. The dresses she wore, the curl in her hair, the heels, the smiles. It was all only ever an act. It was Danielle, never Dani. Danielle was what they expected and Danielle was what she delivered and it was Danielle she felt that she was destined to remain.

Destiny, she decided, was a bunch of absolute bullshit. Destiny had never led her down the right path before. It had led her down the aisle to Eddie, it had led her to England, it had led her into that alley. And now, it’s led her here; Danielle long away, dumped on a train platform in London. Destiny had dropped Dani off in Paris with an infuriatingly cold, albeit tantalizingly curious, stranger. 

A stranger becoming all the more strange now as she steps out of the shower with a flimsy towel wrapped low around the sharp bones on her waist and another draped lazily around her neck, hanging precariously over her chest that Dani was intently trying not to notice. 

“Blonde?” She focuses her eyes on the hair that bobs just above Jamie’s shoulder, wet and dripping onto her shoulders.

Jamie turns her back, bringing the end of the towel around her neck to the ends of her hair, squeezing the remaining water away. She hums, “More of a platinum.” 

Jamie drops the towel from her shoulders entirely and Dani let’s her eyes stay on her back, on her sculpted shoulders, the way they pull into the center of her spine. She can see the way it curves along the toned muscles, trails all the way down to the way the towel sits on her hips just over the curve of her well rounded ass.

Dani would be lying if she denied how fit this woman was, how delightfully appealing she was to the curious eye. She’d be lying if she said that Jamie was the first woman her eyes lingered on just a little longer than they should. She’d be lying if she said that even now, even with so many questions unanswered and so many mysteries undiscovered, even with the unsettling situation she seems to have gotten them in, Dani can’t help but feel the tingle that shoots through her as she watches single drops of water drip from the blunt edges of Jamie’s now platinum hair and down through the valley of her back.

Her eyes trace them down as they navigate their way through the maze of moles that dot Jamie’s skin, like a small metal ball making its way to the bottom of an arcade game. Jamie’s moving, bending and huffing and breathing but all Dani can focus on is the arch in her spine and the ridges and valleys of the muscles and, oh, what she might see in Dani’s eyes if she turned around. 

Dani, despite herself, whimpers, quiet and faint but absolutely there and Jamie turns her head as she pulls a tight black shirt over her torso. A smirk settles and Dani looks down at the ball in her hand. Her grip is tight, tighter than she realized, and if Jamie notices, she doesn’t let it be known.

“Not a fan then?” And it’s hard to focus when her throat constricts at all the ways she’s absolutely a fan. She’s a fan and she doesn’t understand why but there’s something in the contrast of Jamie’s smokey green eyes and this stark light hair that has her hand gripping and releasing and gripping and releasing. Something in it all that has Dani trying to keep herself from reaching for that towel and--

“Uh--no, no. It’s nice.” Is what she settles on. And Jamie seems pleased enough by the answer that she moves back to her bag, grabbing at more clothes. Clothes for which Dani will be thankful when Jamie finally has them on. 

Dani clears her throat when there doesn’t seem to be anything else Jamie plans to say. “Why exactly?” She settles on throwing the ball back into the air as Jamie moves across the room with a pair of jeans.

“You want to get out of this room, right?” She calls out, as if that’s supposed to make any sense to Dani at all. “I can’t leave it looking like me. So, blonde.”

It all clicks just a moment later when Jamie reemerges in a low v-cut t-shirt, a pair of ripped black jeans, and tousled messy hair. There’s a nervousness that plays across her face, but it’s set in playful indifference as she watches Dani hop up and down in anticipation.

“Right. Go ‘head then, get dressed. I’ll take you for a proper drink.”

Dani can’t get ready fast enough.

* * *

“This is where you’re taking me? Here?” Dani looks around them as she shrugs out of her jacket and lays it down over the stool before carefully perching herself above it.

Jamie leans over her elbows onto the bar, propping her small frame up to be better heard over the gentle rumble of the music in the background, holding up two fingers to the bartender. “Two scotch on the rocks.” The woman nods curtly once and turns on her heels away from them. Dani looks over, affronted at the assumption of her order. “And whatever she wants.” Jamie winks and Dani rolls her eyes as she settles back onto the stool.

“This whole big magically romantic city, haven’t seen a square inch of it, and you bring me to an English pub.”

Jamie smiles a devious smile and sets herself back in the stool. “Looking for romance then?”

“No-- no that’s not--”

“Look, Dani.” Jamie rolls her shoulders and then her eyes. “I’m trying to maintain a low profile, I shouldn’t even have you out but I didn’t think it fair that you have to sit in that awful room--”

“Oh, so you do notice how awful it is because it seemed like you didn’t.” It’s said more to herself than anything but Jamie’s lips pull into a tight line of annoyance as she squares her up with a humbled expression.

“I’m sorry that you’ve gotten involved in all this.” And she sounds like she means it. It’s the first time she’s really acknowledged whatever they are doing, whatever got them here and Dani takes the small crack as an opening.

“Involved with  _ what _ though? I don’t even understand what is going on. I don’t get why I’m here or why--”

“Because.” Jamie all but yells and it's the first time Dani has heard her voice louder than a quiet whisper since they met. She rakes her hands along the back of her neck and nods at the bartender as she drops their drinks in front of them. “London isn't safe anymore. Not for me, not for you.” She brings her drink to her lips and Dani watches the way they curl around the glass. “Especially not for you.”

There’s a resigned slouch in the top of her back as she takes another drink. Dani focuses on the way her jaw clenches between sips, the way there’s an unsettled hitch in her throat. Jamie turns her eyes back to the bartender who works across at the other end, doting on a man nursing a beer.

“Do you care to elaborate on that at all?” Dani asks when it seems Jamie isn’t going to offer up anything else. 

“No, not really.” Her eyes are turned away and Dani has to lean in to hear it. It’s frustrating how difficult it seems to be to pull words out of her new found roommate. 

Dani groans and reaches for the pack of cigarettes that sits between them. Something that has become unspokenly theirs. “Jamie. I need something.”

Jamie bangs her glass down on the bartop and it sloshes on the sides. The noise startles Dani and the look in Jamie’s eye is nothing to settle her shaking hands. “Your husband is involved with some bad people, really bad people, Dani. And the second you came out that door, your life--” Jamie drums her fingers along the bartop and stares over Dani’s head at the door, her voice drops as her eyes settle back on Dani’s, serious and hard and altogether stunning. “If I’d left you there, you’d be at the bottom of the river by now and, frankly, so would I for failing at my job.”

Jamie’s eyebrow raises in challenge, daring Dani to ask something else. Daring her to bite, daring her to walk away, daring her to do anything. Dani doesn’t, she reaches for her own glass, now slippery with condensation.

“And your job was to kill my husband?”

Jamie’s head bobs back and forth, mulling, as she takes another drink. Her head cocks to the side, her eyes grab Dani’s and there’s something in them that looks a little like pity and a lot like fear. But there’s also something Dani isn’t accustomed to seeing; honesty. There’s an understanding in them, an  _ I’m sorry,  _ a  _ please don’t ask me, I won’t lie. _ “Something like that.”

It’s not anything she didn’t know. And she should be mad, should be scared, should be absolutely anything but what she is; eased. Jamie eases her, somehow, makes her feel safe. It’s not logical, Dani knows. It’s not normal to feel secure in the company of a woman she knows absolutely nothing about, the woman who was hired to kill the man she spent her entire life trying to explain herself to. She shouldn’t feel safer here than she ever did there. Maybe it’s the way there’s a black handled pistol tucked into the back of her jeans, maybe it’s the way she always seems to speak with the creases of her tired eyes, maybe it’s that honesty. Dani doesn’t know, but she thinks she will one day.

“And I should trust you now?” It’s not said with skepticism or malice, but with a tinge of self deprecating humor. Only because she knows,

“Do you have any other choice?” No. It doesn’t seem that she does.

* * *

She doesn’t like this bartender.

She - they - have been here three nights in a row, three nights of the same whiskey, three nights of the same quiet folk music overhead. Three nights of watching a bartender, Ana, covered in tattoos with an accent similar to Jamie’s, charm and flirt and throw herself entirely at her.

Dani had learned some about Jamie in their nightly trips out for poor bar food and a drink in the smoky pub. She’d learned that Jamie grew up in the north, that she was exceptional at darts, and that the only colors she ever wore were black and white and gray. 

She learned that Jamie loved to read the classics - Chaucer, Bronte, Wilde (though she hated Austen for reasons Dani didn’t totally understand). She learned that the tattered novel Jamie was constantly flipping through in their room was an old copy of  _ Dorian Gray _ that she’s carried around since she was younger. Her one “real possession” Jamie had called it.

She learned that Jamie had a small tattoo low on her hip of an open book - Jamie had pulled the waistband of her jeans down low one night after losing a bet on a soccer match that neither of them had any understanding of just to show it off.

She learned that Jamie closed her right eye and stuck her tongue out any time she tried to concentrate. Right before she threw a dart, eye closed and tongue out. As she stumbled her way to the curb and hailed down a taxi through a drunken stupor, eye closed and tongue out. It was charming, Dani was charmed.

Dani had learned that Jamie was entirely disarming. The half smiles, the gentle rasp of her voice, the way she’d bow her head into Dani’s shoulder to hear her talk when it got too loud. It was disarming and it was easy to forget why they were here, in this pub, and together in the first place.

And now, Dani was angry because Jamie was leaning in close, wobbling on her toes, disarming this  _ bartender _ in the narrow hall by the bathrooms and her eye was closed and her tongue was out in that obnoxiously attractive way. 

It wasn’t jealousy. Couldn’t be, no. Jamie was free to flirt with whomever she wanted. Dani knew that, she told herself that as Ana leaned her bodyweight back onto the wall and Jamie ducked forward to whisper something in her ear. Ana laughed and Dani scoffed as she looked away but this was not jealousy.

This was mere frustration that Dani was sitting alone at the bar with a Frenchman who was trying his damndest to show Dani photos of something, she wasn’t sure, on his phone. He smelled of cloves and his breath was hot and Dani didn’t like that Jamie left ten minutes ago on the ruse of using the restroom only to get caught up in talking to  _ her. _ This wickedly devious bartender.

“Oh yeah?” Dani feigns interest over the 20th photo he’s showed her of a farm. Her eyes widen in mock interest and she takes another sip of her drink. “That’s great.”

It wasn’t great. It was awful. Bloody awful, as Jamie would say. It wasn’t what she had enjoyed of these last three nights and Dani wondered briefly if leaving her ring back in the room was a piss poor idea. It wasn’t that she had attachment to it but at least it was useful in warding off unwanted suitors.

He swipes to the next photo, mumbles something in a mix of french and broken english and Dani uses everything in her power not to knock her head directly on the bartop.

“Alright mate, that’ll do.” She hears that cracked voice come from over her shoulder as a sharp chin drops onto the bend in her neck. “She’s not interested.” 

“Oh.” The man to his credit barely flinches, his eyes dart back and forth between Dani and Jamie and back again before locking the screen of his phone and stuffing it back into his jacket pocket. “You are, how you say--” His accent is thick and it’s sweet that he doesn’t seem all that put off by Jamie’s brashness. His smile still plastered across his criss-crossed mouth. 

And it takes Dani a second to realize what exactly he means. She is, American? She is married? She is drunk? She is--

Jamie snakes an arm around her waist and pulls her roughly back into her own body.

Oh.

“Yeah. Unavailable.” Dani’s hand instinctively finds Jamie’s that’s curled in around her hip and it’s not entirely necessary to thread her fingers with the long and rough ones she finds there but she does anyway. It’s not entirely necessary when she moves her hips back into Jamie’s and closes her eyes at the feeling of her warm body pressed in close but she does that too.

Then again, it wasn’t necessary for Jamie to bite down lightly on the skin of her neck either, not when the man is already turning away and looking for his next target. None of that was necessary. But Dani doesn’t seem to care. Not until all pretense is dropped and so is Jamie’s arm and she’s left suddenly leaning back into nothing.

“Prick.” Jamie mumbles to herself as she brings a cigarette to her lips.

“He was fine.” Dani snatches it away once it’s lit and Jamie just rolls her eyes. “Where is Ana?” She tries to keep the bite out of the way she says her name but she’s not entirely sure it came out as smooth as she intended. Not when Jamie’s lip pulls up and her eyebrow raises and she leans back and just  _ looks _ at Dani for a brief dizzying moment.

“S’pose she’s getting warmed up for me in the supply room.” 

Jamie brings another cigarette to her lips, keeping this one for herself and Dani waits to watch as the smoke blows delicately out through her lips. Jamie licks the bottom one and Dani follows her tongue, frowning at the way Jamie can just so casually push at her buttons. 

Jamie leans her elbow on the bar and flicks her wrist down at the ashtray.

“She likes you.” Dani tries to make it sound casual as she takes a pull from her beer, her foggy vision trying to find something to land on that isn’t Jamie and isn’t that wet bottom lip. 

Jamie chuckles low and brooding. “That’s great for her.”

“You don’t like her?” Dani’s eyes are trained on the row of bottles behind the bar, her mind attempting to arrange them by fullness while trying to keep her tone light, uninterested, even.

She can feel Jamie’s eyes locked onto her profile. Can feel the way they burn into her cheek, her jaw, her neck. “She does a fine job at pouring my drink onto ice. That’s about all I look for in somebody tending drinks.”

“She’s cute. I mean, I think she’s cute. I’m surprised you wouldn’t think she’s cute. I mean, I don’t know-- I don’t have a very good  _ radar _ but she just comes over all the time and-- you looked awful cozy back there.”

“Not my type.” Her eyes catch the movement of Jamie’s shoulders shrugging up and dropping as she grabs Dani’s beer from her hands. Dani follows it’s trajectory, follows the strong hand that snatches it so effortlessly and the long fingers that pick at the damp label and watches as it comes up to meet Jamie’s open, knowing smile. 

“What? Tall, pretty, dark haired mysterious women that throw themselves at you aren’t your type?”

The beer drops back onto the table with a thunk but Dani is still watching her. Her eyes foggy but focused, her mouth tight but puckered. Her shoulders hunched, leaning into Dani’s space as she slides the glass back over to Dani’s hand.

“Can’t say that they are.”

“What is your type then?” The question feels heavy, heavy for who they are and where they are and what they should be doing. It feels heavy because of the way Jamie’s eyes narrow, lidded and dark and she’s tipping into Dani more than necessary for how subdued the bar is tonight. 

“Ah. You’d like to know that, wouldn’t you?” She watches as the words form, tailored and careful on her tongue, as her voice drops even lower, even raspier, than it had been before. 

“I would.” It’s brief, just a fraction of a second, the way Jamie’s eyes flick down to Dani’s lips but the effect is lingering. Dani feels it all the way down into her toes, a shock that has her straightening up and leaning back and,

There’s a sharp elbow in her spine and Dani fumbles the beer in her hand. There’s noise and a clatter and apologies from the burly man that bumped her but mostly there’s an entire beer and it’s dripping all down the front of Dani’s shirt. Jamie laughs heartily, grabbing as many napkins as she can find and blotting at the wet spots on Dani’s neck and chest. 

“Come on. Let’s go get you out of those clothes, yeah? I think you’ve had enough anyway.”

* * *

It’s not the liquor. It’s decidedly not that which has Dani’s entire body burning at the way Jamie lifted her shirt over her head and fell down into bed in nothing more than a bra and boxer briefs. 

“Jamie?” It’s not the liquor that makes her ask it into the still room. “Are you still up?”

There’s a grunted grumble and then a groggy, “No.”

Dani ignores the obvious brush off and settles herself fully back into the pillows. “Can I ask you something?”

“Rather you not.” Jamie’s voice is tired and low and thoroughly annoyed but,

Dani bites down on her lip, feeling the way the blood rises to the surface in a numbing throb, wavering between whether or not she should roll over and close her eyes or if she should let her body wade in the tingling waters. She ultimately decides on the latter. “What’s it like? Being with women, I mean?”

“Annoying.”

“Jamie.”

There’s a shift in the other bed and Dani knows Jamie is trying to keep herself awake enough to have this conversation. “This about that bartender then?”

It wasn’t. It wasn’t about that bartender she hated or the way the knot in her stomach tightened whenever her hand would brush Jamie’s arm as she passed. “No. No, I was just-- yeah, I guess it’s about the bartender.” But then again, maybe it was.

“What do you want to know?”

“I-- I don’t know. I mean-- like what is it like? What do you  _ do _ ? I mean, you seem to know what you’re doing and I just-- I’ve wondered what it would be like. With a woman.”

It’s silent and Dani thinks maybe Jamie isn’t going to answer. It’s silent and Dani thinks that maybe that was a stupid question for a married woman to ask a stranger sleeping in a bed next to her. It was a question that Dani would absolutely not have asked if it  _ weren’t _ for the liquor and the beer and Jamie’s crackling voice and obnoxiously charming one closed eye in concentration. Dani bristles at the silence. Until,

“Women are complex. Puzzles, really.” There’s another rustle of bedsheets and Dani closes her eyes imaging the way Jamie’s bare legs shift under the cool white linen. “Everyone has their own desires, Dani. It’s not a one size fits all. So the first thing you have to do is figure them out. That bartender? Would’ve wanted rough, dirty - quick.”

It makes sense, but Dani swallows hard at the thought of Jamie and Ana and anything that would have been rough or dirty. It’s not jealousy, it’s not.

“It’s all about reading them. It’s all in their eyes, in the way they watch you. It’s in their breath, in their stare, in their little movements - the way their fingers move. I can tell within minutes of meeting a woman just what she wants.”

Jamie’s voice in the dark is like fine sandpaper over a weathered board - quiet and raw - and Dani squirms in place, unable to keep her hips from bucking up and over and around in anxious wonder. Her eyes stay closed, wondering if Jamie had tried to read her. Wondering if Jamie had her pinned down as to what Dani would want, what Dani would like, what would make Dani buckle and bolt and bruise in the best of ways. It’s not the liquor that makes her ask it.

“What--” she clears her throat, thick with curiosity, “what is it that you want?”

“Control.” Jamie answers so quickly, as if she was waiting for the question, as if she knew it was coming. She answers in a way that is just so predictable that Dani almost cries.

Instead she laughs, “There’s a surprise.”

“No, no I mean--” She can hear the way Jamie turns on her side, now facing her. She wants to open her eyes, wants to look at her, wants to see the way the words spill from her pillowed lips but she decides it’s better to maintain some of this delicately dangling pretense and she doesn’t know that she could if she were to look. “I crave control. I like to know that _ I _ am what’s making her feel. I like holding her back, wrapping her line around tight, and then letting it go like a spring. I like going slow, working her up, pinning her in place, making her wait. I like the chase, the build, the before; that part right before the end when you don’t know if it will ever arrive. I crave that control. That power, right beneath my fingertips, right on the tip of my tongue.”

And Dani knows that maybe this was all a mistake. Asking this was a mistake because in the light of day she’s going to be thinking of this. She’s going to be thinking of Jamie and her strong hands and her tight muscles and her thin smiles. She’s going to think about these words and the way they stir up more inside her than any night with Eddie ever did. 

She’s going to be thinking about it like she’s thinking about it now. She’s going to be thinking about it and not even realize that her hand has been stroking lightly against her own stomach, her fingers inching down lower to her waistband. She’s going to forget to feel any shame as her nails scratch hard at her skin, the pain of it giving her just the smallest sense of relief.

But since she’s already here.

“Oh. Do you--? Eddie never, and I never really wanted him to. Thought most people hated it.”

Jamie hums, pleased and pleasured, and she imagines her smile. She imagines it and it’s curious the way her body hums in return.

“My favorite part really. I love all the parts, but that part… Something about it, knowing that you can make a woman come undone just with the slightest little…  _ flick _ .”

And, oh. Dani really does wish she was alone suddenly. The room is hot and her body is on fire but she shivers at the way her nipples tighten against the smooth cotton tank and the way her fingers itch to dip under her shorts. But she can’t. She can’t because she’s not alone.

“Y’know what they all want though, Dani?” She can hear the smugness in Jamie’s voice and it shouldn’t make Dani feel even more unsettled but it does. Jamie, who must know by now what her words are doing. Jamie, who must hear the way Dani’s breath is labored.

Dani clears her throat and she’s not even sure that she’ll even be heard when she croaks out just a single syllable, “what?”

“More.”

“Jamie--” It’s half a moan, half a plea and for what Dani doesn’t even know. 

And it’s brushed off almost immediately when Dani hears one more shift under the covers and then a quiet, faded, “Get some sleep, Dani.”

It’s not the liquor and it’s not jealousy but how Dani wishes it was. Because then she wouldn’t have to deal with this in the dawn of light.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am not above begging for reviews so here is me, begging.
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> I should mention (though it's probably too late) that this fic will have a gratuitous amount of sexual tension and it's gonna be a bit of a slow burn on that front.


	5. everything is alright

Dani was hardly ever qualified to be a morning person. Not when she was a child and her mother would unceremoniously shake her awake with a cigarette hanging out of her hand and a coffee that smelled remarkably like Bailey’s. Not when she was in highschool and her alarm would count her down till the moments until Eddie would pull up in his 2001 Miada and honk the horn until she came out. Not since she moved to England and discovered that the sun came up over the horizon far earlier than it ever did back in Iowa. 

She’d hardly even consider this morning. Not when the clock was blinking at her in bright neon; 3:27. Morning, night, Dani disliked it all the same.

Jamie had woken her up in a less than delicate fashion; just a dropped sweatshirt on her head and a light tap to her shoulder and a bruised, “C’mon get dressed.”

Dani rubs at her eyes, trying to adjust to the darkness in the room and the shadowy figure that’s moving around in a manner that can’t be described as anything but fidgety. Her movements are stifled, unpracticed. She’s not as effortlessly calm as she had been up until now, not when Dani can see just a hint of a tick in her hand as she analyzes the magazine of her gun before stuffing it back into her belt.

Something feels off, something more than Dani can understand and it’s what makes her sit up fully. “What--why? What’s going on?”

The room is pitch black save for the light coming off the silent tv that flashes in the background. Jamie takes a small hesitant step forward as the blues and greens cascade the side of her face. There’s worry in her eyes but her voice is steady as she says, “We need to catch the 5am train to Frankfurt.”

“Okay.” Dani still hasn’t moved. Her stillness countering Jamie’s restlessness in a way that has Jamie looking over at her with a heady gaze and something that looks briefly like a plea on the tip of her tongue. “But why exactly?”

But it’s all gone as Jamie steps away and towards the bathroom, releasing a heavy sigh through her teeth. Dani knows that sigh, she’s heard it enough to know exactly what it means, what it cannot say, what it won’t ever. She waits for words, waits for any sort of explanation as to why Jamie looks like she’s seen a ghost but all she gets is the sharp clang of rusty pipes as the water turns on and off and on again. 

Dani grips onto the sweatshirt in her hand and brings it to her nose. It smells vaguely like the cologne Jamie wore when she leaned in close at the pub with her arm swung around her waist and it’s soft between her fingers in a way that Jamie never has been with her and something in Dani just  _ snaps _ -

“Let me guess, this is another one of those things that it’s just better that I don’t ask and instead pretend to be your little puppet that just does whatever you tell me.” Dani can taste the acid in the words on her tongue. She knows they sting, the way she wields them through the air and out into the void. 

The room is mute, all sounds cease and Jamie turns the corner with a clean toothbrush hanging out of her mouth and something akin to hurt in her eyes.

“That sound about right, huh?” Dani spits as she pulls the sweatshirt over her head and gingerly stands on tired legs. They wobble just a bit, her head trying to right itself with the hour and the lingering alcohol in her veins and Jamie is quick to step forward and steady her with a calm hand on her shoulder.

Jamie sucks the water out of the head of the toothbrush and pulls it out of her mouth, tapping it once on her teeth and Dani tries not to focus on the way her lips shine. But she must be caught in the moment of it all when Jamie’s eyes shift from hurt to humor and she just leans into Dani slightly with a wry smile on her lips. Dani’s gaze dips and Jamie’s reaches to catch her, tapping her twice under the chin with a bent knuckle and Dani finds it hard not to look back up and into those eyes and for everything that screams at her not to, she can’t help but find some sort of trust in them.

“You can be my little doll if you rather.” Jamie’s teeth are bright in the dark and Dani really just wants to wipe the grin off her face in a way that trickles down to her toes.

“Somehow I find it hard to believe that you have ever once played with a doll.” And Dani really should just step back, step away and wash her face and get that smirk on Jamie’s lips out of her mind but it’s hard when she smells how she smells and she looks how she looks. 

Not when she’s stepping in and her belt hits Dani right on the hip and her body shutters at the cold metal on bare skin. Not when Jamie is brushing the hair away from her ear and leaning down and over and Dani can feel the breath against her neck more than hear the way she says, “I’ll play with whatever you’d like me to if you get bloody dressed.” 

Jamie pulls away and winks exactly once and Dani scoffs but her anger is faded now as she backs out of Jamie’s grip and picks up the ratty jeans she had on the night before.

And as much as Dani doesn’t want to admit that something in her has changed in the week she’s been in the company of this brute of a lady, it’s hard to ignore how comfortable she is dropping her pajamas right there in the middle of the room and pulling on the jeans instead. It’s hard to ignore the way the only thing she can think to say is,

“Promise?”

And it’s early in the morning and neither of them have had enough sleep for this so when Jamie just drops the bag on her foot and curses at the way it hits her toe, Dani can’t help but smile. Smile at the flustered way Jamie picks it back up and slings it over her shoulder as if she isn’t mumbling under her breath something that sounds an awful lot like, “Dani, for fuck sake.” 

It’s only a few minutes later when they are walking about the door. “Wherever you’re taking me better be nicer than this.” 

“As you wish.” And she doesn’t know if she means it but it’s becoming a little bit of a habit for those words to leave Jamie’s mouth at whatever Dani asks for and she doesn’t hate this morning as much as she should.

_____

She has no idea how long she’s been asleep but she can only assume it’s been long enough with the throb in her back at the way she’s hunched into a ball on the seat. She doesn’t remember falling asleep and she definitely doesn’t remember falling asleep practically climbed up onto Jamie’s lap but she can’t find much care in her now. Not as three fingers delicately scratch at her scalp in the most casual and absentminded manner. 

There’s a gentle way that her fingers move, a soft stroke with dull nails that scrape along the base of her neck before running through the length of her hair entirely. The steady rhythm of it all is soothing and it’s been a long time since she’s had this sort of intimate contact so she let’s her eyes close just to savor it a little longer.

It’s on the fourth stroke that Jamie pulls, just the barest of tugs, on the ends of Dani’s hair and she can’t help the way she shifts at the electric pulse it sends through her and Jamie stills entirely. Dani doesn’t have to see the hand hovering just a hair’s length above her head to know Jamie’s fingers are contracting as if trying to convince herself not to keep going but hardly being able to stop. 

Dani doesn’t let her choose when she places a hand on top of Jamie’s and lowers it back to her head. “Feels good.” Dani hums, actually hums, and she wonders if Jamie feels the buzz too. 

“Are you ever going to tell me?” It’s an absentminded thought, coaxed out with Jamie’s tantalizing strokes from the top of her hairline through the ends of her hair and Dani doesn’t know exactly what she even is looking for with it.

Jamie doesn’t seem to either when her hand stills and she taps one finger against Dani’s forehead. “What?”

“Nothing.” Jamie tugs her hair in a way that tells Dani she doesn’t believe her and she breathes out through her nose as she sits up, letting the blood redistribute itself through her body. Dani’s starting to equate that tug to so much more and she shakes her hands to try to jolt herself back to the present.

It’s only when she rights herself that she realizes there’s a book open in Jamie’s right hand, the same tattered copy of Dorian Gray that she was reading in the hotel and Dani has so many questions she wants to ask. So many mysteries she wants to solve about this one singular woman.

To herself, “Anything. Everything.” And then louder, “are you ever going to tell me who we are running from?”

Jamie drops the book heavy in her lap and runs her nails down her neck in a way Dani can now identify as frustration. “I’ve told you--”

“--I know, I know.  _ They aren’t good people, Dani. It’s better you don’t know, Dani _ .” It’s the same answer she’s gotten in the past and she doesn’t know why she expected anything different now. 

“They  _ aren’t _ good people. And it  _ is _ better for you not to know.” There’s finality in Jamie’s voice, in the way her hands clasp together at the base of her throat and her eyes roll up to the ceiling. 

Dani shifts back into her own seat as she brings her leg up under her and watches Jamie’s jaw tighten. It was frustrating, the not knowing, the guessing, the wondering and the running with no end in sight. It was frustrating the way this woman would shut down at any mention of the unspoken that lingered between them.

Dani plucks the book out of Jamie’s lap and drops it into her own. Jamie’s eyes shift to the side and Dani thinks that maybe if she were to just try something different this time... “Okay how about I ask you some questions and you tell me if I’m right?”

Jamie clucks her tongue against the roof of her mouth and makes a strangled sort of noise but it’s not a no. “Will you stop asking me if I say yes?”

Dani holds three fingers up in the air and places her left hand against her chest. “Scout’s honor.”

“Scout’s what?” Jamie’s eyebrow raises and looks at her like she’s grown two heads and Dani can’t help the way there’s a slight pang against her chest at the innocence of it all.

“Nothing.” She shakes her head in quick succession. “Yes, I promise.”

There’s silence and then a slight nod and Dani practically bounces in her seat as Jamie shifts to lean against the window and crosses her arms across her chest.

“Is it like some top secret CIA type thing? Well I guess no because the CIA is American but whatever the equivalent to that is?” Jamie just shakes her head with a muted grin and Dani jumps over a chance for a follow up as she lowers her voice and looks around. “Oh my god are you a spy?”

This earns something that’s partially between a laugh and a snort. “Do I look like a bloody spy?”

And no, Dani doesn’t think she does, never truly did, but she had to ask. Because the alternative - well the alternative was far more real than she wanted to face. Her eyes settle on the passing green hills outside the window and she asks the question that she thinks might finally be the answer. The one she’s been trying to avoid because she already knows. Deep down, she’s known since the moment Peter walked in through her front door.

“Jamie, are you in the mob?” Jamie makes a motion that’s half nod, half shake of the head. “Is my  _ husband  _ in the mob?”

Jamie exhales, long and deep and she releases the knee that she had pulled up to her chest and shifts uncomfortably in her seat. “Whether he knows it or not, he is now.” 

Dani chews on that, chews on the reality of what she had already expected but now was confirmed and it wasn’t as much of a blow as she had anticipated. She suspects it should be, suspects it should be entirely gutting - but she hates to admit, even to herself, that she hasn’t thought much of Eddie in the past week and has thought even less about  _ how _ he’s actually doing right now in her absence. 

She chances a look back at Jamie and she’s not entirely surprised to find her stare; glued and unwavering and there’s sincerity behind the self deprecating way she asks, “You’re not luring me into some sort of honey trap right?”

Jamie’s mouth softens and she shakes her head in a way that’s more unsettling that any look she’s ever given Dani. Because it’s honest and it’s raw and it’s all together terrified. “I’m luring you away from the beehive.”

“And I’m safe with you.” It’s not a question this time and it’s not a joke, it’s the truth and Dani feels it settle over her.

“Dani.” Jamie shifts and let’s her hand fall to Dani’s knee. “Listen to me. I can’t tell you whether or not you should feel safe with me. But I need you to believe me when I tell you that I am going to do absolutely everything I can to make sure that you are safe.”

“Okay.” Dani nods and bites at her lips and feels the way the blood beats beneath her skin and she remembers that she feels safe here, she feels protected. “Okay. That’s enough for me.”

______

The good news was that this hotel was miles above nicer than the hotel they stayed at in Paris.

It took more than some pouting and a whole lot of prodding before Jamie reluctantly agreed to let Dani pick where they stayed for this leg of their impromptu trip.

Which is how they found themselves standing now in a moderately priced 3 star hotel Adina overlooking the river Main. It was modern, with crisp white sheets and muted gray carpet. The walls were a dark brown and the curtains a deep red and something about it felt risque in a way that Dani had never dared explore before. She remembered reading once, when she was decorating their London brownstone, that there was a psychology to colors. These were purposeful, meant to seduce, to invoke, to sensualize.

Dani takes it in, takes in the entirety of the room and the colors and closes her eyes just for a moment to picture a different scenario. One where she wasn’t running away from something terrifying but  _ towards _ something better. One where she wasn’t watching the way Jamie grits her teeth around the key card or gripping their oversized duffle in between nimble fingers but biting  _ her _ lip and grabbing  _ her _ wrists and -

So yeah, the good news was that this was an absolute upgrade from the rotted room in France. The bad news was that Dani’s German wasn’t nearly as good as she remembered it being and maybe she forgot the difference between king and queen and maybe she forgot to ask for more than one bed. 

It was entirely Jamie’s fault, really. It was her fault that she pressed in close when Dani leaned over the counter and spoke to the man in the most broken German she could remember from her two semesters of introductory learning. It was her fault that the man smiled when he saw them together and Jamie just winked at him in a way that allowed him to draw his own conclusions. It was her fault that Dani was so distracted by Jamie’s toned thigh just narrowly creeping between her legs as she leaned forward to pluck a mint off the counter that Dani forgot to correct him at all.

“Christ.” She hears Jamie breathe as she finally gets herself in the room fully, dropping the heavy bag onto the ground and brushing past Dani, fingers lightly guiding her around her waist, and walking further into the open room.

For all it’s worth, a blush  _ does _ creep high up onto Dani’s cheeks and she at least tries to look as put out by it all as she knows Jamie must feel when Dani says, “I hope you like to cuddle.”

The deadened look she receives is something she can’t entirely pinpoint; both pained and pure. Jamie’s voice is even as she plops down at the edge of the mattress and lets her body fall backwards. “I hope you don’t mind that I prefer to sleep naked.”

And Dani does everything she can not to let the image take over her mind but it’s entirely impossible. Not when she’s seen the way Jamie’s shoulders pinch together as she wrings out her hair, not when she’s seen the cuts in her hips that dip below a low tied towel, not when she’s felt all those muscles and how they contract whenever she finds herself too close. Dani swallows and it’s heavy.

Jamie sits up and the smile on her face tells Dani that she knows exactly what she’s doing, can see the pit in her throat, can see her breath as it stalls. She leans back on her arms and her muscles pop and it’s entirely consuming the way the left side of her mouth ticks up with just a hint of mischief and a low husk in her voice. “If you want me to, that is.”

Dani knows it’s a joke but she doesn’t know if the joke is even funny. Her palms sweat and her heart races and she doesn’t think she can share a bed with this woman. Not tonight, not when her messy hair flops in her bright eyes and the veins in her hands pop out with her delicate grip against the comforter on the bed.

She turns quick on her heels, searching for a way out where she can breathe and she can think and the room doesn’t blur around the edges. “I can go down and get a different room--”

Jamie’s quick to stand, grabbing Dani by the shoulders and catching her traveling eyes. There’s darkness there, something wanton and loaded and Dani hangs onto the smallest bit of resolve she can find. “No, he was giving us strange looks and I rather not raise any flags, so this is fine. Right?”

But suddenly, Dani isn’t sure who Jamie is trying to convince, Dani or herself.

_____

Turns out, it wasn’t fine. Dani made it a whole six hours before everything completely unraveled from fine to absolutely disastrous. A whole six hours from Dani being able to press aside the low buzz in her chest to traipsing completely over the line of ignoring it any longer.

It had started out innocently enough, with a bottle of hair dye. It was Jamie’s idea, saying that if she was going to change her look that maybe Dani should too and it was completely intoxicating to think that maybe with throwing away Danielle, she could throw away all the things Danielle had brought with her. 

Her scalp itched as the color burned away all the last parts of that young girl who sat in the salon with her mother and tried to make Eddie happy. All the colors that Dani once dreamed have somehow culminated into a bottle of muted brown hair and she tries not to laugh at the irony. 

Because for Dani, she had never felt more alive than now; with gentle earth tones guiding her towards being reborn.

And it had nothing to do with the fact that for the second time that day, Jamie’s hands were in her hair and they were digging into her scalp and Dani’s brain was fogged in a way that nobody ever warned her it could.

“How’s it looking?” Dani opens one eye and looks up at Jamie’s face that is doing that same concentrated stare she always has; one eye closed and her tongue poking out.

Jamie doesn’t answer, just gives a quiet hum in acknowledgement as she pulls the wet liquid through the ends of Dani’s hair. Her eyes close instinctively at the pressure. She focuses on anything else. She focuses on the smell, the burn, the itch. She doesn’t focus on the hands.

“I’ve always wondered what I would look like with brown hair, actually.” Dani says, shaking away the feel of Jamie and her fingers and the way she was starting to feel it all over. “My mom wouldn’t let me. Said that boys preferred women with blonde hair. Made me start dying it as soon as my roots came through. I guess I never thought to change it again.”

“Eddie liked it blonde. So I guess she was right about that.  _ Blondes get more attention, Danielle.  _ Maybe it wasn’t the attention I wanted but at least it got me something, right?”

Jamie wraps the entirety of her hair up in strong hands and squeezes hard, pulling the bun away from her head and Dani’s eyes snap open again and she doesn’t find that look of concentration on Jamie’s face. She finds something else, something more deadly. Something potent and daring and Dani wants to look away but she can’t. Not when Jamie is bending her knees into a squat so that she’s eye level and oh, it’s the first time Dani has truly felt on the same plane as her.

Jamie takes a hair tie off her wrist with her teeth and looks squarely at Dani before wrapping it around her bun. “Think you’ll look okay.” But she clearly means more than that. She clearly means something else with the way her face is far too close for her to not feel Dani’s breath, far too daring for her not to know what her hands are doing. “A whole new you.” Before standing back up.

Dani chances herself, wetting her bottom lip, instinct taking over as her left hand reaches out and grabs at Jamie’s thigh before she can walk away. Neither of them move, but Dani knows they both feel the way her palm burns into Jamie’s skin just under the loose material of her boxer shorts. Neither of them move but she knows Jamie feels the way her fingers grip tight like she’s holding on for something she’s never once had. Her nails dig into the skin underneath and Jamie inhales a sharp breath. 

“Jamie, I want-”

“You should,” her voice is thick as it breaks over Dani’s and she clears it loudly into the quiet space. “You should wash that out.”

And so she did. 

She stands under the shower until the water runs cold down her back and she thinks of the woman in the room with her sideways smile and her crooked stare and her sculpted jaw. She thinks about the way her eyes darken when she speaks, the way she can't help but stare at Dani’s lips when she talks. She wonders about that look of concentration and how it might change if she was concentrating on something different, something more, something carnal-

Dani lets her hand move from the ends of her hair to the center of her stomach. She let’s the water beat down on her back as she drops her head to the cool tile. She’s cold, everything is cold, but when she dips her fingers between her legs all she feels is heat. Everything burns, from her hand to her wrist to her shoulder as she turns her head and bites into the flesh just to keep herself from making any noise at that first guided touch.

She thinks of those fingers, strong and firm and tugging on Dani in a way that said it was her, her  _ control _ . She thinks of them as she traces slow circles, barely any pressure, into her own skin. She thinks of them now and she knows that this will be quick and it will be all consuming in a way that Dani can’t prepare herself for, not now. It’s too late.

Dani’s lips part over her wet arm and her breath comes out in short spurts as her hips grind down to meet her curious hand. Her pulse is high, she can feel it in her wrist as she lays her head against the arm that’s propping her up against the wall. She wants to draw it out, wants to wait, wants not to even do this at all but then there’s that goddamn smile.

Her circles get tighter, her body tenser, and she pictures Jamie’s shoulders below her. She pictures Jamie’s choppy hair beneath her knees. She pictures how that smirk would feel against the inside of her thigh, he pictures that tongue that sticks out the side and her hair tangled in knots through her knuckles and-

As the brown dye runs through her hair and down the drain and washes away everything stifled that Dani once knew, she’s falling right down with it.

She’s toppling over the edge and there’s nobody to catch her. There’s only a woman in boxers on the other half of a bed where she has to now lay and pretend that everything is fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> may i remind you of the slow burn tag?


	6. a rock and a hard place

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know jack shit about art, even less about Germany. I've only ever been to Dussledorf. So if there are any German Art History buffs out there please forgive me and also blame google.

It was almost easy to forget the precarious situation that led to their unlikely coupling each time Jamie’s elbows bumped into hers atop the tight table they shared, perched outside a cafe in  Römerberg square .

The sun was warm against her cheeks and the cool breeze was a delight in her lungs as she leaned back into the metal chair, taking in everything around her.

It had been Dani’s demand paired with a smile and a plea. She had had enough of the hotel, enough of the same grimy sweatpants, enough of Jamie’s oversized hoodies and walls that seemed to enclose upon her with each passing minute. She wanted her own clothes, fresh air, and a day of feeling like something about all this was normal.

They had walked around for a while, peaking into stores here and there. Dani held up shirts and sweaters, all colors of the rainbow, and Jamie nodded her head along to each. What Dani wanted, Jamie bought; nary an argument about the cost or the volume went along with it. And now, with six bags filled of clothes that were tailored for her in both size and personality, Dani settled under the early afternoon sun with Jamie by her side and a quiet comfort that lulled between them.

The medieval architecture of the Romer is stunning, unlike anything she’d ever seen. It was like something out of a storybook, like something in tales of princesses trapped in the tower waiting for their knight to jostle for their hand. A picture of times before, the three peaks pointing into the sky, plucked out of centuries past and dropped now into the background of tourists posing for photos in a line.

“I feel like I’m at Epcot. Like I should have Das Boot in my hand while drinking around the world.” Dani says just as much to herself as she does to Jamie and Jamie just nods absentmindedly in return as she leans forward over her cup of tea, breaking apart a croissant and plopping it not-so-delicately into her mouth. Dani smiles, watching the way her jaw works in over itself, her eyes scanning the people around them, grading each of them with careful consideration before moving on to the next.

It was something Dani noticed about her; she was always on edge, always aware of their surroundings, always waiting for a reason to reach into the back of her waistband with a finger on the trigger. Dani suspected it had everything to do with her - well, Dani supposes it’s a job but she isn’t really up for asking questions - not today anyway. Not today when the warmth bathed her cheeks and the peace was easy between them.

Dani watches as Jamie brings the drawstring of her sweatshirt into her mouth and chews on it nervously, her eyes fixing on something across the square. Her long fingers grip the teacup in front of her, spinning it around and around. The tendons in her forearm flex instinctively and her eyes grow dark. Dani studies her, her eyes filtering over in a dark haze, her thumb ring rattling against the side of the cup and her teeth grinding down harder against the metal clip of the hood in her mouth.

Dani follows her stare, settling in on a man sitting under an awning, a black hood pulled up over his head and sunglasses perched low on his nose.

There’s a delightful shriek, a child, and Jamie’s hand seizes at her side, just a tick - reaching back and covering the gun strapped to her waist.

“Hey.” Dani brings her palm to Jamie’s arm and lays it down firmly.

“Yeah.” Jamie’s voice is distracted, her eyes still locked on the dark figure nearly 100 yards away. The child runs towards him, he stands, opening his arms to another delighted cry and his hood falls away. Jamie’s jaw relaxes but her hand still shakes against the pistol.

Dani looks back to her, running a thumb across her wrist, coaxing her attention away from the now harmless scene. “Hey, it’s just a kid.”

Jamie looks down at her cup, at her jittery hand as it reaches forward once again and laying flat on the table, and then back up to Dani. She’s unsettled and her breath comes out raspy against the back of her teeth, “yeah. Just a kid.” She shakes her head and sucks in a sharp gulp of air as her eyes soften. “Yeah, sorry. I just-”

“I know. But it’s fine.” Dani grips her fingers around her wrist, once, twice, and then lets go and lets her hand fall back into her lap. A tingle at the tips as she stuffs them between her thighs just to keep herself from reaching back out again.

She brings her espresso to her lips, letting the bitterness coat her tongue as she watches Jamie settle back into her seat, resuming her careful scanning of the crowd as it passes. Dani clears her throat after a beat, her cup rattling as she sets it back onto the table. “So now that I have everything I need-”

Jamie smiles, a mischievous glint on the corner of her mouth as her eyes duck to the side and look Dani from ears to eyes to lips. “You have everything an entire dance troupe would need.”

Dani’s mouth sets into a hard line and she straightens her back, wiggling against the hard wire frame of the chair and crosses her left leg over her right. “I couldn’t keep wearing your stuff. Black is not a good color on me.”

Jame chances a look, solid and sorted and it makes Dani shiver, before she turns away and brings the tea up to her mouth to take a sip.

“I’dunno. Rather liked you wearing my clothes.” Jamie doesn’t look at her again, her chin dipped low and her shoulders curled around her elbows as they lean down onto the metal table. She doesn’t look, just keeps her eyes forward out into the crowd, darting from one group of tourists to another.

Dani swallows. Ever since that night she-- well ever since she couldn’t turn her brain off while her body turned on to every feel and sound and innocuous touch, she found herself more keen to the way Jamie spoke. The way the words, often casually dropped with an air of indifference into conversation, seem to always teeter on the unspoken. Dani wonders if Jamie knows just what type of effect they have on her.

Dani clears her throat, wringing out the thoughts that swirl through her mind at the sound of Jamie’s low husk pinging through her ears. “Is there anything you want? Are you good with-”

“No.” Jamie’s tongue pokes out, brushes the tip across her bottom lip as her head rocks side to side. “No. I’m good.”

It’s about all she gets these days from her. Just a few tight words, just a play at the tacit energy that pulses between them and she sighs. “Well we can head back to the hotel if you’re tired. Or we can-”

Jamie stands up, abrupt and sudden and Dani thinks that maybe this day was wrapping itself up in a nice little bow and she should just take what she got and run; a pleasant afternoon, a dull thrum of happiness, and now back to the dark room where she’d plaster on a smile and sort out her own feelings deep in the corners of her mind. And she’s ready for that until Jamie holds out her hand with an impish smile and says,

“Actually, there’s a place I’ve always wanted to go.”

_____

Dani wraps her arms around her torso, the cold air of the stark white room crawling up her arms and into her hair.

She looks around at the other patrons. There’s a woman in a flowing dress standing with a firm grip on her husband's suede patched elbow who keeps looking over at them, a scowl on her brow and a frown on her lips, a whisper in the ear of the man at her side.

Dani leans into Jamie, reaching into the front pocket of Jamie’s joggers and pulling at the zipper. “You are insanely underdressed for this place.”

Jamie looks down at her hand, gripping the fingers and trapping them in place. A smirk on the corner of her mouth, before meeting her eyes. “I’m  _ comfortable. _ ” She plucks at the rolled up sleeve of her plain white t-shirt and shrugs her shoulders as she drops Dani’s hand back to her side. She tries not to find it entirely endearing but she’s discovering that with each passing moment it’s getting harder to remember what life was like before.

There’s another couple that passes behind them, sniggered quips to each other about their state of under-dress and Dani feels herself sink in. She’d always been conscious around Eddie, to look a certain way, to fit in, to blend into the crowd. But Jamie - Jamie wore herself wide open as she was, with no apologies and no shame. 

“Yeah, well, your comfort is making us stick out like a sore thumb.”

Jamie takes a step towards the corner of the room, bright lights hanging over Early Renaissance paintings that looked smaller than Dani would have ever imagined them to be.

“What’s so special about this place? I mean, other than the obvious.” She gestures, her hand pointing out to the works around them, their meaning entirely lost on her.

Jamie shrugs, her shoulders flopping loosely as she stuffs her hands deep into the pockets of her pants. She rocks back on her heels and nods to the work in front of her. A realistic portrait of Mary breastfeeding baby Jesus, perched on a wooden throne. Dani squirms, something unsettling about the lifelike imagery sitting stark in contrast on the bright wall.

“Did you know that in World War II they had to move all these paintings out in the middle of the night and store them in a secret location just so that the Allied forces couldn’t destroy them? Good thing too because the place was practically demolished by bombers. Some of these are almost as old as Europe itself.” 

“Oh so you’re a buff then?” Dani elbows her side, a quirk on her lips, and she expects a quip back, a snark or a taunt but instead something passes over the girl beside her. Something different, something serious and somber and pained.

Her shoulders hunch and Dani thinks that maybe there’s a raw nerve there that she’s hit. “Yeah I- I actually- I studied art.”

Dani’s head cocks to the side, a sudden curiosity pinging at this woman who has always chosen to remain an enigma. “You went to art school?”

Jamie nods, a tight stretch across her jaw as it juts out and glances quickly at her before looking back, trained and focused on the canvas.

“Art history. Not- I’m absolute shite at creating it but sometimes...” She takes a small step forward and like a string, Dani’s rapt attention is pulled with her. “I love what it means. Each stroke is so perfectly detailed, so calculated. Everything has a purpose and the only person who truly knows that purpose is the artist. Brilliant minds, they are. I mean, look at this one. Look at the detail. The lines and the strokes. They are so entirely clear it’s like you can almost feel her pain.”

She gestures to the next painting on the wall. A simple portrait and it doesn’t strike Dani as anything immaculate but the haunted look on Jamie’s face is gripping at her, tugging her closer, bringing her deeper in.

“Who is she?”

“ _ The Portrait of a Young Woman. _ There’s no real way to know but so it goes, this woman, Simonetta, was the most beautiful woman in all of Italy and the painter, Botticelli, was obsessed with her. She showed up in so many of his works, at least six, but always from the side. Just her profile; her lips, her nose, her hair. As if she was too beautiful to look at face on, like she’d overpower the senses all at once.”

Dani looks for it, looks to see whatever it is that has Jamie so entranced as she speaks. But she finds herself more captivated by the way Jamie’s lips form the words that spill from her mouth. The way the edges of her voice soften and fold over themselves. Her hand aches to reach out, to make some sort of contact, to absorb just the smallest amount of whatever emotion it is that’s playing across Jamie’s face. She keeps it at her side.

“Historians say it’s all just romantic nonsense, that she was merely a face and he was merely a brush that was inspired by it. But I think I like it better that he was in love with her, even if he didn’t even really know her. That there was something so enchanting about her that he just couldn’t possibly stop. Can you imagine?”

It hits her, like a swift sharp romp against her beating chest. Her blood pulses, beating through her heart and her hands and her fingertips. She hadn’t even realized how close she had moved in until Jamie turns her head, her face close enough to see the hard lines that have etched their way from her eyes to her temples.

“He painted this right after he painted part of the Sistine Chapel. I would just love to know what about _ that _ , inspired _ this _ .”

It’s almost impossible to keep herself from leaning in, tilting forward and steadying her hand on Jamie’s arm. It’s almost impossible to keep her voice steady and calm as she breathes just a single word. “Jamie-”

“Never did find out though. Didn’t finish my degree. Life, as they say - well, life can be shite too.” There’s a flash of something, something haunted, but it’s quick, just a tick, because then she’s looking over Dani’s shoulder and her eyes harden and turn and she’s reaching out for Dani’s wrist to pull her in close.

“I had no idea you were so-“

But her thought never finishes. Not as she’s being whipped around and dragged through a door marked  _ exit _ and into a darkened stairwell.

___

They make it to the bottom of the stairs before Jamie pins her to the wall. The cover of the steps over their heads as she moves them both in time to the dark corner; step by step, inch by inch.

Dani’s heart jumps into her throat as she stands on the precipice of something torrid, something that makes her throat go dry and her vision blur. Her eyes close and she waits.

And she waits.

Jamie’s body presses in, lined up head to toe, her breath hot against Dani’s neck as her forehead leans onto the cold concrete at Dani’s back. Jamie’s calm, even, as her hands press Dani in place, rendering her unable to move or think.

She waits.

Her hand flexes at her side, keeping herself steady despite the uneven way her pulse scoots around her veins. Jamie’s pulling back, looking at her with a demure glance. Her eyes flick back and forth between Dani’s dilated pupils, her hips pressing in, and her teeth chewing on the corner of her bottom lip.

“What are-” But Dani is silenced in swift motion with a hand across her mouth. She can taste the salt on Jamie’s palm, can taste the apprehension as she bares her teeth, just a little, and nips at the muscle of her thumb. Jamie brings her other hand to her own mouth, a single finger pressed across the puffy pink lips that Dani longs to taste.

There’s a click from the door above, a whoosh of background chatter, and then near silence as it closes again. A scuffle of boots heavy on the concrete above, Jamie’s body tenses, her grip over Dani’s mouth digs into her cheeks, nails leaving crescent moon shapes in her pale skin, and she pushes her further back into the shadows.

There’s a thick fog of danger in the air that lingers all around them and it’s not that Dani doesn’t know or recognize it, recognize their situation or why there was a look of terror in Jamie’s eyes when she pressed her back against the concrete wall. It’s not that she doesn’t know, in fact she finds the complete opposite - something about it excites her in a way she can’t possibly begin to describe.

Can’t describe why she reaches forward and into Jamie’s pocket tugging her closer. Can’t describe why she pulls Jamie’s leg tighter between her own and why the pulse that settles low hums up into her chest as she feels the direct contact of a toned muscle against the wet heat that’s gathering between her legs.

She knows Jamie must feel it too. Knows she must because Dani can’t help the small whine against Jamie’s palm, can’t help but bite at her flesh again just to keep herself from making another sound, can’t help but grind her hips down just a little harder - even as the shuffling of boots echoes above them both.

Jamie’s head falls against the wall just slightly. Dani can feel her ragged breath and the ghost of her lips against the sensitive pulse point of her neck. She wonders if Jamie can taste the way her heart beats, if she can taste just how badly Dani wants her.

She grips tighter into the pocket of Jamie’s joggers, feeling another timed flex of the muscle that’s now pressing up and into her in a slow, meticulous rhythm. She hears another scuffle of footsteps and she thinks that maybe if this were the way she was going to go, at least it would be worth it - quite literally between the calculated rock of Jamie’s hips and the hard wall at her back. 

But the echoes of the steps are getting softer and Dani is acutely aware that they are moving further away. Up the stairs, perhaps. Up and far and maybe the pressure that’s tightening low in her belly will begin to ease but it doesn’t, not at all. Not when Jamie rolls in, just a bit more rigid and desperate, and Dani reaches around to grip the back of her shirt, balling it into a fist and feeling the pistol in Jamie’s waistband knock against her own knuckles.

And there’s something about teetering on this edge, the threat on the other side of the wall and the security of Jamie’s body against hers, that has Dani’s head fuzzy, her ears ringing, and her vision dark as she closes her eyes against the weight of it all. There’s something about the way she can picture how Jamie’s long fingers wrap around the trigger, confident and portentous and the coil inside her wraps tight with a hard grind down into Jamie’s thigh and then releases, her legs shaky and squeezing against the one that’s holding her up.

There’s another door opening and the scrape of shoes is gone. The silence envelops them and Jamie’s hand flexes once more around her jaw before dropping down to the side of her neck as Jamie breathes in heavy and deep.

Jamie pulls back, just enough for Dani to see the darkness in her eyes that crashes over like a wave and Dani knows that they aren’t going to talk about this. They aren’t going to talk about how Dani’s legs are still wobbly and her hands are still gripping against Jamie’s back and how there’s a damp spot on the center of Jamie’s leg that wasn’t there a few minutes ago. They aren’t going to talk about anything as Jamie grabs Dani’s hand and leads her out the exit and into the alleyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I beg for feedback the way we are all begging Jamie to just go ahead and fuck her already.


	7. the build

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m going to take this moment to point you towards the E rating of this.
> 
> Also, this Jamie is really more just what I picture when I see Amelia in Shadowland.

The cold breeze against her cheek is a most welcome relief from the heat that is still coursing through her veins as she tries to get her bearings. 

The brick wall is rough against her back as she presses hard into it, leaning all the weight off her shaking legs as she breathes through her nose. She concentrates on the way it scratches at her skin, tearing at her through thin cotton, taking her mind away from the beating pulse that travels through the center of her body. She brings her fingertips to the hollow of her throat, letting them tremble against the heavy way in which she swallows down a dangerous mix of fear and want and confusion.

Dani looks up from her feet, planted out in front of her, her heels digging into the ground and up to, “Jamie.” It comes out in a rickety breath, ping ponging against the roof of her mouth and the flat of her tongue as it falls out in a whoosh.

Jamie hasn’t settled since they walked out into the alley. A light pink tint paints the top of her cheeks, the base of her neck, and Dani knows that she’s flustered. Flustered by their moment, unhinged and unplanned in the shadows of a darkened stairwell. Flustered by the footsteps that had echoed above their heads. She paces, tracking back and forth in a straight line, and it makes Dani uneasy. Her voice cracks again, but with more volume and more power as she pushes herself up off the wall.

“Hey, look at me.” Dani’s hands settle at her sides, gripping the material of her pants in her hand just to keep them from reaching out and stopping Jamie in her tracks. “Jamie, can you- can you just look at me for a second.”

She takes a hesitant step forward and into Jamie’s line of sight. Her steps halting in place but her eyes staying trained to the ground. Dani digs deeper at her thigh, her nails scratching along the material of the jeans pinched under the nervous tick of her fingers.

She moves to catch Jamie’s eyes, moves to meet them and see what storm brews behind their ever changing color. “What just happened in there?”

Jamie cracks her neck to the side, “I thought-”

Dani steps closer, the toes of her trainers kicking out at Jamie’s. “What? What did you think?” Jamie’s gaze briefly darts to her own before looking away to the door at Dani’s back. The door to the stairwell, the door back to where they just came from and - “Jamie, talk to me.”

She looks back, her blonde hair frazzled around her cheeks and the worry that settles across her jaw has Dani reaching out and pressing her thumb into Jamie’s temple as she swipes a stray lock of hair away. Jamie swallows down the words that flop in her mouth before narrowing her eyes at Dani and settling on a quiet whisper. “I thought I saw somebody.”

She lets her hand move down the side of Jamie’s face, resting itself on the nape of her neck, her nails digging into the tiny hairs at the top of her spine. “You thought or you did?”

Jamie shakes her head and Dani can feel her pulse evening out on her palm. “I did. I saw somebody. And if he knows we are here, it’s only a matter of time before-”

It happens fast and Dani barely has time to register anything besides Jamie’s right hand reaching back into her waist, perfectly timed with the left one that grabs Dani’s hip, spinning her out of the way as she advances towards the swinging door that rattles hard against the brick as it opens.

Dani stumbles on her feet, trying to steady herself at the rapidly changing environment. By the time she looks up, she sees a hooded man, his heavy boot flying through the air and kicking Jamie’s gun from her hand. Dani watches it skid across the asphalt, clacking as it bounces end over end to her feet.

He delivers a blow to Jamie’s jaw, her head craning to the side from it’s force and Dani watches wide eyed in horror as she can already see the blood gathering at the corner of her mouth. Watches as Jamie grabs both sides of his head, pulling down and into her knee as it raises up to his nose with a crack.

Dani wants to move, wants to find the breath in her lungs to scream, but she’s frozen in place. The two of them move in a blur, the fists and arms and bodies sputtering across Dani’s vision like a cartoon swirl of dust and cloud. She can taste the copper in her mouth, her jagged teeth digging into the skin of her lip until it bleeds, her jaw wired tight as she struggles to push air past her throat, her head struggling to catch up with each movement before her.

She can hear Jamie grunt, each more pained than the last. She can hear mumbled words, vile and hurling through the air, as Jamie is whipped around by the back of her neck and pushed into the wall, her head smacking back into the brick with a shot and Dani’s jaw unlocks as she gasps for air. 

The man laughs, menacing and raw as he snaps a blade out from his pocket and Dani reaches down for the gun at her feet. It's heavy - the weight of Jamie’s life that sits on her shoulders presses her down into the earth as she stands. Her hand is wobbly and she doesn’t trust her own aim, doesn’t trust herself to hit her target, but it’s all so fast and blurry and she feels the way her finger tightens around the trigger-

He falls in a slump. His knees hitting the ground, then his palms, then his chest. Unmoving, unblinking, just a cold stare at Dani from the ground. He’s gone, she knows, the deadness in his eyes is gobsmacking and she thinks she hears herself scream. She thinks she can hear the way the panic releases out of her lungs and into the air but all she hears is ringing.

Jamie’s at her side, her right hand broken and bleeding on the side of Dani’s neck as she soothes her with a calming swipe of her thumb under her eyes. It’s only when Jamie’s head lands on her temple, the pressure leaking into her skull and her chest, that she realizes that they are both alive. 

“Did I-” Dani’s hand quivers at her side, the butt of the gun hitting her hip as Jamie stills her hand and slides it away, her finger still wound loosely around the trigger. “Did I kill him?”

Jamie releases a low breath and Dani closes her eyes as it hits her neck, reveling in the fact that it’s real and it’s tangible and it’s done. “No. No, you didn’t.” 

Dani rocks back, looks down at the unmoving body as the blood pools around his side, and back to Jamie with a question feathered across her brow. The answer is unspoken as Jamie raises her hand, the blade in her fist, tinny and wet and soaked with blood. And somehow, the sound of it landing on the ground as Jamie drops it away and brings her bright red hand up to Dani’s chin is all it takes for her to finally let the sob escape through her lungs, to let absolutely everything go.

____

Jamie’s hands are mangled. Dani can see the tiny cuts littered across the purpling skin as she wipes away the dried blood that’s crusted in place. The alcohol must sting, she’s sure of it, as the towel glides across Jamie’s closed fist, but she remains unfazed as she takes another swig of whiskey straight from the bottle.

It’s quiet in the room, just the dull hum from the air that circulates through. But Dani’s mind is screaming, anxious and racing, as she processes the events of the past few hours. Processing the art, the stairwell, the dead man at her feet.

She looks up at Jamie, her jaw pulled tight and the tendon in her neck popping at the grind of her teeth, holding in all the answers Dani desperately seeks. “So are we going to talk?”

Jamie shakes her head, another swig of whiskey, and a slight wince as Dani straightens out the fingers that lay gently in her palm to wrap the bandage around tight. “I don’t know what there is to talk about. I took care of it, d’int I?”

Dani’s head bobs back and forth. Sure, she had taken care of it, but without so much as an explanation as to what she was taking care of. “Who was he?”

Jamie’s shoulders pull up and drop down. “Dunno really. Never seen him. But he was one of Peter’s guys.” She winces again, “could be a bit more gentle, yeah?”

“Oh now you want to be sensitive?” Dani smiles and drops Jamie’s hand down into her lap, motioning for the other that’s currently gripped around a half empty bottle. “How do you know that?”

Jamie seems to muddle over the question. Her eyes are trained on the delicate way Dani's fingers run across her bruised knuckles, feeling the way they dip and rise, the cracked skin rough against her smooth fingertips. Dani thinks about those hands, about their power, about the men that must have died at their strength and steadiness. Dani thinks about how harsh they were the few times they grabbed at her wrists, about how they dug into her skin when she dried to keep Dani quiet. She thinks about how they have done more for Dani than possibly anybody has done in her life.

“He found us, means somebody else will find us soon. We need to leave tomorrow.” Her voice is calm but her eyes are strained, worried, and pleading for Dani to just let the silence envelop them.

Dani finishes wrapping the second one, watching the way the stark white of the bandage pops against the black and blue skin that’s starting to develop beneath. Jamie’s fingers twitch against hers, just the smallest bit, and Dani feels the way her pulse quickens as the graze against the inside of her wrist.

She brings Jamie’s palm to her mouth, letting her lips graze the calloused skin, the muscles that contract in something Dani can only pinpoint as restraint. Her eyes meet Jamie’s over bloodied nail beds, finding them watching her with wanton abandon, her pupils large and waiting. And she thinks that maybe this is her chance. “Are we going to talk about... the other thing?”

Jamie’s hand retracts, letting her fingers glide over Dani’s pouted bottom lip, down over her chin, down her neck and then into her own lap. “No.”

And that word, that one simple word, has the warmth in Dani’s veins rise and bubble and surge. Surge towards that unsettled anger, that annoyed tension that always seems to lay just beneath the surface. Jamie stands from the bed and Dani’s eyes follow her across the room.

“We aren’t? We’re not going to talk about what happened in the stairwell?"

Jamie’s hand reaches for the bottom of her shirt and Dani knows what she’s doing. She knows that this is the challenge; to push Dani to her limit while Jamie leads her down an un-winnable path. “What happened, Dani?” Her shirt lifts over her head and Dani tries not to let her solid abs, her protruding hips, and the forming black circle at her ribs distract her.

“You- you can’t possibly tell me that you don’t have  _ any _ idea.” Dani brings her hands up to her hair, pulling at the ends of it in frustration. In frustration of being shut down, in the frustration that’s been lingering in the pit of her stomach for days, at the frustration of not being able to push Jamie past this point of walls and roadblocks and silence. “You can’t possibly tell me that you don’t know how close you had me to-”

Jamie pulls at the waistband of her joggers, letting them fall to the ground. “You were scared, I was- I was trying to protect you. But I- that can’t happen again. I let my guard down and you almost, we almost... Just, you were scared and that’s all it needs to be.” 

And it’s not lost on Dani that Jamie stands bare, just a bra and briefs and bruises, and yet she’s never felt more closed off from her.    
  
“I’m going to shower. I have blood all over me. Just- just go to sleep.”

____

Berlin is gray and rainy when they arrive. The clouds are angry, ominous, as they rumble across the murky sky. Dani waits for them to open up and swallow her whole.

It feels like a metaphor. A metaphor for the past day, the past 24 hours, dealing with a woman who has become desperately mute and brooding. Each word of Dani’s stifled attempts at conversation turned away and shot down and pushed aside.

The hotel this time was simple but fine; clean, private. The two beds on opposite sides of the room felt like a blow, but then like a relief when Dani realized that distance now might help to temper down the brewing desire that seemed to rise each time Jamie looked at her with pained eyes and poised indifference. 

It shouldn’t, Dani knows. Those looks that Jamie gives her shouldn’t make the hunger inside her grow. The casual brush offs should make Dani yearn to reach out and be touched; to grab and push and pull and pry whatever she can out of the cold character at her side. But with each moment that passes where cursory glances yield to longed stares and gruff dismissal, Dani can’t help but crave just a little bit deeper.

The bar they sit at is dark, which Dani assumes isn’t by accident. There’s a dark circle that’s formed under Jamie’s right eye, the blood that’s pooled under the surface of her perfect skin has turned blotchy and raw. Her hood is pulled up over her head to hide from any unwanted attention.

Dani downs the rest of her drink in a fluid motion and waves at the bartender for another.

“Make it two of whatever she’s having.” A woman sits down on the stool beside her. Dani’s eyes travel up from the hands that rest on the bartop to the tattoos that litter her skin, up to a tight t-shirt and finally land on a wry smile.

“Don’t mind if I join you, do you? My friends found some friends and I rather not look like I’m free for those men over there.” Her voice is low, husky, and it reminds her a bit of Jamie’s. Her jet black hair is tucked into the collar of a bomber jacket and Dani can’t help but wonder what something like that would look like draped across Jamie’s strong shoulders.

She looks over to her side, at the way Jamie’s jaw tightens and fixes her stare on a soccer [ _ it’s futbol, Dani _ ] game on the television behind the bar. She watches the way Jamie’s hand tightens around the bottle neck of her beer but makes no move to look back at Dani and so she decides that if Jamie can play this game, then maybe she can too.

“Dani.”

“Dani, a bit far way from home I see.” The woman reaches out a hand for Dani to take, her hands softer than Jamie’s in nearly every way and Dani smiles a gratuitous smile back as she takes it in her own. “Natalia.” 

Dani smiles, not letting it entirely reach her eyes but she’s perfected this act of forged friendliness from the years she’s spent on Eddie’s arm. “Just on an adventure.” She turns her body on her stool, her back to Jamie in what she hopes is a message that’s accurately received. “What about you? Are you from around here?”

The bartender plops two vodka sodas on the bar and the girl beside her smiles in return, sliding a bill back across. “Ah no. On what you would call the bachelorette party, I believe?” 

Natalia speaks with her hands. She’s boisterous, flamboyant, and all together the opposite of Jamie. Her accent is skewed, something Dani can’t pinpoint, and she assumes that she’s somebody who has traveled and lived all over.

“My friend, Jolene. My flatmate from college, another silly American tradition I hear. But she’s,” Natalia turns around, regarding a group of women across the room who look to be rather engrossed in a pair of men in tight shirts and even tighter pants, “well, rather busy it seems right now so I thought I could sneak away for a drink with the beautiful woman across the bar.”

Jamie huffs, and it’s light enough that Dani has to question whether or not she even hears it but she doesn’t turn back around. She doesn’t tell the woman to go, she doesn’t go back to staring at Jamie’s locked jaw, her wrapped knuckles, or her icy demeanor. Not when Jamie’s huff and slammed beer bottle on the table tells Dani that maybe this will work. And when desperate times,

“Well, I never say no to a drink.” Dani lifts hers, a sly grin around the edge of the glass as she takes a sip. A smirk that says she’s happy in this woman’s presence but that means she hopes it will make its point. She hopes that it will make another when she trails her fingers gently up Natalia’s arms before leaning on her palm and saying, “so tell me about these tattoos.”

____  
  


The door to the room slams, hard enough to rattle the mirror on the wall and startle Dani out of her buzzed haze. The lazy grin that’s painted her mouth since Jamie stood abruptly, grabbed Dani’s shoulder and said it was time to go. The lazy grin that didn’t falter in the slightest when Natalia scribbled her number down on a napkin and slipped it into Dani’s front pocket as Jamie nearly growled out Dani’s name impatiently.

She’d been silent on the cab ride back, her hands stuffed deep in her pockets, her teeth grinding down in a way that she only did when she was mad. She was silent as they got in the elevator, silent as they walked out of the hall, and now she seemed to be letting her anger bubble over as they walked in the room.

Dani’s lazy grin is gone now. Gone as soon as the door handle automatically locked in place. Gone as Jamie pushes swiftly by her and into the dark room, not even bothering to turn a light on as she flops heavily onto her bed. Dani sputters, the frustration building and bursting and she can’t help it when she throws off a shoe, throws it towards Jamie, and watches the way she sits up stock straight. “What on earth is your problem?”

Dani huffs, taking her other heal off and sits perched on her side of the room. “I’m not the one with the problem, Jamie.”

Jamie lifts the shoe that landed by her head, waving it into the air. “Really, because you just threw this at my face.”   
  
Dani grips at her shirt, balling the material in her first and letting go again. “Because you haven’t talked to me all day, you barely said a word to me at the bar and-”

Jamie scoffs, standing from the bed and walking to the small refrigerator in the corner, pulling out a bottle of water. “Please. You did just fine, didn’t you? Got a phone number, didn’t you?”

Dani had hoped for this; some trigger pin to make Jamie just  _ talk _ to her. Something about the way Jamie’s voice snarls pokes at the heat that swells and settles low in her core. Something about the way her eyes gloss over with unearthed desire resonates low and Dani moves forward. Moves off the bed and up to Jamie and she straightens her shoulders back, daring her to bite. “So? I don’t see why on earth you would care.”

Jamie regards her, studies her hard and Dani fights the urge to sink back into herself. “I- you need to be careful. We aren’t on some tour of Europe, we are on the fuckin’ run and you can’t just trust people you meet in bars.”

“Oh, but I can trust women who abduct me off the street?” The biting laugh that comes out of Dani’s is involuntary, and she regrets it as soon as she says it.

Jamie picks up the room key and stuffs it into her pocket, crossing over Dani’s space, shaking her head lowly against her chest and letting the air wisp out of her lungs in a rush. “God you are bloody infuriating.”

“ _ I’m  _ infuriating? Really, Jamie? I’m the one that’s infuriating?” Dani watches her back as she reaches the door handle, silently pleading for her not to turn it. “Okay because from what I remember you’re the one that’s been ignoring me ever since you practically fucked-”

Jamie’s head drops onto the door and the thick thud reverberates into Dani’s chest. She counts, counts the seconds until Jamie turns around and they can put this behind her but instead all she gets is a mumbled, “I’m going out for a walk.

“Of course you are. God forbid we have an actual conversation about absolutely anything that has to do with-” the door slams before Dani can even finish saying, “us.”

____

Dani sits back onto her bed, her vision blurring as she stares up at the dark ceiling, the buzz of the alcohol numbing her skin. Jamie’s eyes, swimming with something that she can only decipher as jealousy, playing back through her mind over and over like a black and white film.

Her body shouldn’t hum, shouldn’t tinge with lust and ache. She shouldn’t feel the pressure that builds and burns and breaks inside her. She shouldn’t fall back and let her fingers trail down below the waistband of her unbuttoned jeans. She shouldn’t find herself completely soaked as she lets a single finger trail up the center of her legs, shouldn’t marvel in the way her back arches off the bed and into her hand.

But Jamie’s eyes and the contempt in her voice over Dani’s thinly veiled attempt at eliciting just the faintest hint at  _ something _ made her nerves stand on their ends. Made Dani crave at being clawed and claimed and  _ taken. _

Her finger continues its path, trailing up and down the length of her, feels the way her stomach tightens, the coil winding and constricting as she closes her eyes and picture’s Jamie’s hooded glare as she leaned into Dani in that stairwell.

Her legs fall open wider, she moves to dip her fingers in, just to the first knuckle, but the zipper of her jeans pinches at the back of her hand. She groans, the awkward angle making it difficult on her wrist but she can’t bring herself to stop. Can’t bring herself to move her hand out of the way just long enough to kick her pants down a little lower. Not when her hips are bucking up to her hand each time it retreats. Not when-

The door opens and Dani wishes her reflexes were just a little bit faster as Jamie walks into the room in a heated stride. “Dani, listen-”

Her hand snaps up and out and onto her stomach but it’s not fast enough. Not nearly fast enough when Jamie’s eyes’ catch hers and her mouth snaps closed and it’s so painfully obvious what Dani had been doing and she’s mortified. She’s white and pink and embarrassed and so very-

“Oh my god, I- I am so sorry.” She scurries herself up the bed, leaning hard against the headboard and trying to catch her breath and waiting for Jamie to say something, absolutely anything. Waiting for Jamie to turn around and walk back out and let her sink into the springs of the bed and let them swallow her whole.

But Jamie doesn’t. She doesn’t do anything; doesn’t move or blink or try to find something that will make Dani cower away. Instead she just clears her throat and in a husk that has Dani want to rip off her own skin, she says “keep going.”

Dani doesn’t speak, her mind wracking back those two simple words and Jamie sits down in the chair in the corner of the room, calm and poised and leaning forward with her hands folded over her legs as if she was asking for the weather. She looks down at her bandaged hands, rubbing across her covered knuckles and her head buried into her chest and Dani begs for her to just make eye contact when her voice says just a fraction louder, “do you want me to go? Or do you want to keep going.”

Jamie looks up and Dani can’t quite tell the color her eyes have settled on tonight but she imagines they must be dark. They must be cloudy and hooded because her voice is thick with her question. And Dani can barely find anything else to say when she just nods her head. “I- yes.”

“Take the jeans off.” Her voice is cool and balanced and Dani burns as she kicks them down her legs. The black lace that’s left to cover her feels almost non-existent and she feels the way Jamie’s stare burns at her from across the room. “And go slow.”

So Dani does. With a curious finger she pushes the fabric to the side and the pressure between her legs is almost painful. The throb pulls at her, begging her to do anything but go slow but Jamie’s imperturbable demeanor is grounding her to the one demand.

“Are you thinking of me, Dani?” Her voice is relaxed, unbothered, and it's rough like sandpaper in her ear. 

Dani closes her eyes at the sound, her hips rocking up into her hand and it’s so incredibly difficult to go slow. Not with that timbre that echoes in her ears. “Yes.”

“Tell me what you’re thinking about.”

And Dani can’t think, can’t begin to put into words the way she’s thinking of absolutely everything at once. Thinking about how deeply her life has changed since Jamie came along, thinking about how dangerous she feels and how much that turns her on so she settles just on an all encompassing, “you.”

Dani hears a squeak of the leather, Jamie settling back into the chair and she can’t help the way her legs spread wider at the thrill of her just  _ watching. _ Her adrenaline pumps through her veins and Dani knows that she’ll never be the same, not after this. “My hands on you, right? My hands around your mouth telling you to be quiet. Are you thinking about my nails in your cheek, my fingers around your chin?”

And Dani knows that if Jamie is going to insist on talking her through this, there’s no way to go back. Not now, not for her, not when she’s been laid bare in the most intimate way. 

She moans, the guttural noise reverberating against the hollows of her throat as she imagines their position the day before. Imagines what she had wished Jamie had done, imagines how she felt with Jamie’s hand wrapped around her and grabbed onto so much control.

“My hand is all bloodied now, though, innit? All scraped up and bruised. All because I was just trying to protect you.” And the thought of that, of Jamie putting herself in front of Dani in that alley, of her using her own body as a shield, has Dani bringing her free arm up over her mouth. She can feel the way she drips onto the two fingers she has gently gliding through as they come up and over her most sensitive spot, not making contact just toying around the tight bundle of nerves. Practicing slow patience to wind her body closer to the edge.

“You almost came when you grabbed my gun yesterday.” Dani bites into her skin as she begins to trace circles, staying wide, away from where she needs them, wanting to draw this out for as long as she can. “You don’t think I noticed that? Don’t think I noticed the way you bit down when you felt it against your hand? Don’t think I noticed the way your eyes go dark every time I put it in my waistband?”

Dani whimpers, the thought of Jamie being able to read her body like that, to know exactly what it was that set her alight, thrums against her chest. 

“Is it the danger that turns you on, Dani? Is it that you could be so close to death at any moment when you haven’t even really gotten a chance to live yet? Is that what makes you wet?”

Dani’s hand tangles into her hair and pulls. Picturing Jamie’s own hand, a battered and broken fist curling into the locks around her neck and her hips are bucking. She can hear how wet she is, can hear her fingers sliding around herself and she knows that Jamie can too.

“Or is it about giving up that power? Are you thinking about it now? What it would feel like to have that barrel pressed against your neck while you touch yourself? Are you thinking of what it would be like for me to have something cold against your throat while I have my tongue inside you?” Jamie’s voice cracks, low and throaty and Dani wants to feel it against her body. Wants to feel the way her words twist and pull against her, mumbled into her skin. 

There’s nothing organized about the way her hand moves now. It’s sloppy and sliding and messy and Dani is desperate. She’s desperate as her eyes tighten and the twist in her stomach has her writhing against the bed as her breath quicken and she bites down harder into the flesh of her arm. 

Dani is close. She’s close and she’s desperate and she’s wetter than she thinks she ever has been and it’s only because of Jamie’s words. Jamie’s rasp. Jamie’s cadence and calm and hoarse crackling pitch when she leans forward and says, “You’ve always wanted to live on the edge haven’t you? But you’ve always been so good. But good girls don’t think about me like this, do they? Imagine all the ways you can be bad, Dani.”

And that’s enough. It’s enough to send her down, careering to the ground, tumbling off the cliff as that tight twine releases and pulses and drips down her. And she’s happy for the cover of darkness now, happy that she can’t see the satisfied smirk on Jamie’s face or the way her hands tremble on the tops of her thighs. She’s happy Jamie can’t see the sheen of sweat across her brow or the shimmer on her knuckles. 

She breathes, deep and heavy and she’s exhausted and the buzz has lifted now. All she wants to do is sleep. All she wants to do is curl up into this moment, into feeling that maybe Jamie isn’t as far out of reach as she was before. They’d need to talk about this, to talk about what the hell just happened and how the line they had toyed for so long had been washed away like chalk on a sidewalk but for now-

Jamie brings the blanket up over her bare legs as her eyes blink heavily into the darkness. “Don't ever hide yourself.” Dani hums, unable to form whatever words she needs for this moment as Jamie leans down and wipes the hair away from her forehead. “Don't ever hide away what makes you feel good, okay?”

And Dani knows that, that's the one thing she's sure of. But as her eyes drift closed, she can't bring herself to do anything but smile. T he last thing Dani registers before she succumbs to sleep is the dip in the bed as Jamie climbs in next to her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I recognize that this type of burn may not be for everyone. I won’t take offense. But Dani is about to do a lot of exploring about her own sexuality.


End file.
